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WVG : The New Scalable Vector Graphics
jafro_svg writes "While the press has discussed Microsoft's upcoming 'Sparkle' as a potential Flash-killer - the technology arena on which Microsoft's new technology is having the most impact is SVG. SVG (now a W3 standard for 3 yeras) was itself billed as a Flash-killer some years ago, and speculation about how it might be accepted into the mainstream for developers (i.e. incorporated into IE) now seems inevitable -- you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG." Jafro_svg also points out this online SVG tutorial.
With Flash so popular on the Internet for multimedia presentation (used from everything to full-motion video), I fail to see how any other initiatives (even those backed by Microsoft) can manage to eat into the radical marketshare of Flash.
These days, you see flash taking the place of all client-side drawing, from games to its intended use of vector animation to entire layouts for websites. Flash
has evolved past simple vector drawings and is now, unfortunately, a part of the Internet that will probably be here to stay, with its annoying audio and annoying ads.
Even if it is incorporated into IE, web developers will see no reason to switch
to this new technology. Microsoft often reserves new initiatives for higher versions of Internet Explorer and leaves the older users in the dust, telling them to upgrade. With such a wide majority of users reluctant to upgrade, it'd be kind of pointless for webmasters to use this instead of flash.
Yes but...people already know Flash, they've gotten years of practice and make lots of money off of it. Despite potentially better technology, will they switch from what is familiar?
For reference, see Minidisc, laserdisc, Apple, and Linux...
Use CSS and HTML! So many pages out there use flash when its not required (Some people might even say its never required), a bad examples of flash www.shaw.ca, you get to wait as the stupid flash scroll slowly shows you the text in the boxes.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
In most cases, Flash is abused by people who think it adds pizazz to menus or advertisements anyway. 99% of us would get along better without unless we're watching a cartoon or playing a game in it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Ok, so Microsoft is coming out with a product that is 90% the same as an existing product from another vender, but 10% optimized for windows only, and probably *just* different enough that it's easy to get in to, but hard to switch back. It'll be included with every copy of windows (when it's released sometime towards the end of the decade).
Sound familiar to anyone?
you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG.
Funny how Microsoft never manages complete compliance with a standard. How does it go again? Oh yes: embrace, extend, cripple, discard. Repeat ad nauseam.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
MS have taken a published standard, altered it in minor but annoying ways for those of you ho have to deal with browser compatibility and massively publicised it. This sounds like the MS approved HTML debacle all over again. WTF happened with that Anti-trust case?
Communication and data exchange protocols ought to be open standards by law, damnit!
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
Where's the incentive in producing this supposedely high-caliber product if only to make it free and/or cheap? It wouldn't be beneficial for any companies involved.
This being a standard in browsers will be a hard-to-come-by thing. Although it appears to have W3C standards, everybody seems to have their own little ways to distort the standards.
Plus, vector graphics in flash load fast anyway. Have you ever seen a (well-designed) flash banner slow your page load?
If Flash really was replaced by WVG, do you know what the result would be? It's simple: Flash would be replaced by WVG. Instead of everyone complaining about the annoying Flash ads and site designs, we'd be complaining about the annoying WVG ads and site designs.
What's that you say? WVG won't support audio?[1] It won't be interactive like Flash[2], so there won't be any websites made entirely out of WVG? Then what on earth makes you think people will switch from Flash?
[1] I really have no idea whether WVG will support audio. If it will, my point is even stronger.[2] See [1].
Vector graphics at the time were a new concept and were introduced to a non-saturated Internet market. The 'Net was still in its developing stages, and people had no vector animation tools already.
The situation is completely different today. This is a foray into an already saturated market as Flash dominates the field and wipes the floor clean with the blood of its competitors.
you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG.
And Microsoft FrontPage and IE support a version of HTML that is 90% identical to W3C-compliant HTML. It's that last 10% that makes me want to throw my forehead through my monitor every day at the office.
Is everyone really missing the point?
'Sparkle' is a vector designed drawing engine for APPLICATIONS inside longhorn, it is NOT being billed as a WEB standard.
'Sparkle' is the transitional replacement of the GDI model of the Windows interface. Moving from a Bitmap model to a true Vector model for the Windows UI.
It has NOTHING to do with SVG, Flash, or Web standards.
If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.
The only reason the 'Sparkle' vector engine of Longhorn is getting buzz in this area is that unlike Quartz, it supports a wide array of animation standards within the vector drawing engine.
So, yes it functions somewhat like Flash of today, but that DOES NOT mean it is meant to replace Flash. Instead, it should be the new OS UI rendering engine that FLASH itself uses to draw FLASH applets in a browser window. (Get it, it is the vector engine under applications and things like Flash will use to render on screen.)
The same for SVG, there is no mention that SVG will not be supported in the new IE of Longhorn, in fact, SVG will probably be supported, but be drawn in the UI by the 'Sparkle' Engine.
This is an application/OS level vector rendering engine with animation, it is not a Web standard, nor does it purport to be.
Please stop with Microsoft is abandoning standards and trying to take over the world because they are moving their OS UI model from bitmap to vector based. That is all, get over it.
Everyone thought it was great stop forward in UI rendering models when Apple did this with Quartz, so how is Microsoft evil in developing their own rendering engine as well?
A cacheable (please!), dynamically generatable (without histrionics) SVG implementation is a much awaited flash killer if you ask me.
Unfortunately MS seems hell bent on taking an open standard, hacking it to bits, making it a "proprietary standard"(sic) and no longer inter-operable with the original standard, then deluging the market with a glut of installations... Eerily reminiscant of the good old JVM days...
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SVG IS XML. All of it. Always has been. It's a vector graphics format that's written using XML primitives rather than binary ones, but it's still a vector graphic format. Chances are if the size was too big, it was because either someone embedded all of their font info inside of it, or there were huge number of path directives, but bit for bit SVG files are generally not much bigger than the binary formats they represent (especially if they are gzipped).
For the past year and a half I've been working in spare time on fleshing out maps of Russia and the former Soviet Union republics, one map for each oblast/province. Check out either Mappoint or the equivalent views on Expedia? At the detailed view, these are the most beautiful maps in the world, 100% better and more detailed than any National Geographic Atlas. But there's a catch. You can only see tiny little patches of the whole map at a time. Therefore, in order to see a detailed view of a whole oblast, you have to stitch together a quilting project, grid by grid along a north to south baseline, and then move across east and west, doing repeated screen shots and piecing the grid together carefully. One little hitch, though. As you move up and down and across the grid, the details change because of their ridiculous javascript-based map generating engine. Thus in one view of a grid you might see two villages; in the gridpoints three degrees west, they should still be there sitting on x:y coordinates by such-and-such river, but they are GONE! In other words, details get wiped out at the edges of the grid views.
If you are perseverant enough to stitch the whole together, taking into account rotations for each patch of the quilt as you move from the baseline east and west, you end up with a beautiful bit map view of the whole oblast, a collosal file size, and with lots of defects because of the problems along seam lines where the screenshots (the quilt patches) overlap. Along N/S grids, you can wipe out 20% of the villages, and even names of major cities (because of the problem of shifting positioning of text). File sizes make them all but useless for the publishing on the web (largest maps are upwards of 10 MB even when compressed to PDF).
The obvious solution is to remap all the topographic detail using SVG so that you end up with a seamless map showing the same detail level, down to villages and rivers, that has the whole oblast in one snapshot, zoomable down to the detail you need to see roads, railroads, and national parks. This would reside in a text file that is probably going to be large for some of the geographically large areas (Chukotia, Khabavarosk, Taymyr, Buryatia, etc.), but by comparison with bitmaps - tiny, and viewable in a browser. For detail areas, you add clickable links to city maps too. So, for example, if you want to look at Sverdlovsk oblast, you can click on Ekaterinburg or Nizhniy Tagil and zoom right down to a city map showing street names, monuments, parks, and other features.
This is where I see real potential of SVG on the web. At least, it's the project I'm working on for the foreseeable future, which will probably take me well into retirement years.
Look at his posting history, all he does is spew microsoft propaganda
And funny, I also write a lot of code for Linux. Makes you rethink how safe this whole Open Source thing is, ah?
Just kidding, although I do write a lot of things for Linux...
I abhor the lynching of any company when it isn't based on fact. Pick on Apple or Linux for the wrong reason, and you will get a response from me as well. However, Linux and Apple are seldom bashed at SlashDot or 20 people have already responded to defend them. Microsoft seems to be the kicking boy around here, and sometimes they deserve it, but not EVERY TIME.
I am no serious fan of any specific OS, I just want the competition to continue so that future OSes will be far beyond what is conceived and rambled on in many of these posts.
It amazes me that OS fans(especially here) get so complacent with what the current development cycles are producing and the lack of vision of what is around the corner.
Microsoft may be fools in a lot of regard, but they are not losing any R&D ground by being 'happy' with how things currently are with their OS.
Apple is also starting to lead innovation again after a 10 year dead cycle.
Solaris just keeps moving the old model forward, Linux is maturing, and the BSD variants are setting some security standards, but there is nothing revolutionary coming from these OS groups.
Where is the next thing? If I had to bet now, it will be from Microsoft or Apple - they at least get that catching up is not good enough, creating something that never existed before is the real brass ring.
Just like the 2.6 kernel, what is really great and new in it that doesn't exist already in some other OS already available? And it kills me that people are so 'happy' about what is new in the 2.6 kernel, like the new scheduler - other *nixes have had better schedulers for a long time; Linux is once again just catching up. Even the original NT kernel scheduler is more advanced than pre-2.6 Linux kernels.
It is time to take theories and start putting them into products, and then creating new OS theories and implementing them as well.
That is one of the few things Microsoft did do right with the NT project - take un-implemented OS theories and put them together in a cohesive OS model. Seems everyone is so busy hating them they have missed their angle that gives them the edge even today.
While Mozilla is a great piece of work technically, the management can't be described anything other than moronic.
I am a supporter of free software and I also have several webpages.
That's why I have given up any hopes of Mozilla spearheading new technology. To do that you have to have some minimum of self-confidence which the Mozilla project lacks.
That's why Apple chose KHTML and not Gecko.
KDE 3.2 will come out in about a month and Konqueror will come with SVG support out of the box. IE will have something similar later. The sad fact is that Mozilla's minority complex is so big that they simply won't incorporate anything that isn't in other browsers in a usable form, so Mozilla users will have to wait for Konqueror to hope for a useful SVG-implementation in default-Mozilla.
There are so many things right in front of the noses of Mozilla maintainers that would make Mozilla a better browser and would introduce killer-features, that no other browsers support, yet they prefer to let those technologies rot unused and wait for other browsers to support it.
This is what Microsoft does all the time. It takes an open standard and it obfuscates it so that it's esentially 90% the open standard and 10% MS-introduced irrelevant crap to make the format proprietary. Then MS patents their 10% so that people can't really write some filter to convert from one format to another without risking to be sued. This is what Microsoft calls 'innovation'.
Mozilla has SVG support for years. Sadly, Mozilla maintainers don't support it and don't put it into the default distribution.
Saying that SVG will kill Flash ist like saying Python will kill JBuilder.
If it weren't for the Flash IDE, Flash would be nowhere. If MS manages to build an IDE of simular ease-of-use to designers and alongside manages to actually implement true OOP in the underlying scripting of the technology, THEN there will be a Flashkiller.
Until then we'll have to live with this semi-proprietary technology, with the hip looking IDE frontend, the cool flash vector animations and the most crappy scripting object model ever concieved by the human mind. One that triples development time in comparsion to other technologies. Which is why we still hardly see serious webapps developed in Flash. Maybe that's even for the better.
Let's all just hope that MS fails as well, and that somehting like a OSS JMF IDE pops up to take over the reign of Flash. We'd finally have a client-webapp IDE that runs on Linux. That would be cool, wouldn't it?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Thanks to Eolas' law suit regarding embedded media (or apps?) in webpages, Microsoft can now proceed with their alternative, and dominate.
Picture this:
The next release of IE has that stupid "fix" when running ActiveX in order to comply with the Eolas lawsuit settlement terms. Flash no longer "just runs" in webpages, but pops up a prompt to initiate the app. (Refer to previous articles on the Eolas VS Microsoft case for more accurate details).
IE being MS's own technology, MS comes up with a method of running Flash-like media, of their own format (Sparkle) in web pages that does not involve an annoying prompt, and which doesn't run afoul of Eolas' patent.
Bingo. Flash is now crippled, and the viable alternative is Sparkle. And MS can deflect any blame to Eolas. Now you know why MS didn't just license Eolas' damn patent!