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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.
the real question will be, will it be copyrighted so that only IE / MS can use documents created with it like they are doing with the new word standard.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
It's funny how some things turn out. Two years ago I was doing some research for a software company (they made CAD software adapted for ship design with lots of extra features) who wanted to put their product tutorials online and create a feedback system. The idea was that they wouldn't have to spend so much time teaching users how to use their software.
Anyway, I was looking at designing interactive websites and had to investigate a whole lot of new technologies, SVG among them. I found a few really cool examples, but nothing really useful. I also concluded at that time that it would be too hard to get SVG working in the users' browsers (Netscape 6.0 had just come out - it supposedly supported SVG, but damned if I could get it to work properly). Also, no one else was really using SVG at the time.
So in the end we went with Flash - not for the site design, but for interactive physics examples that helped the user to understand why different design decisions gave their ships different properties. Now that SVG (or the MS version) is being incorporated in IE, I could see it being useful for these type of things. Of course, there is the little matter of Flash being well understood by developers who've got lots of experience, and the large installed userbase... Will be interesting to see what is being used in another few years.
None of this is that surprising. Why re-invent the wheel? Especially when you can repackage the wheel under your own brand name, add some bevels, and shift the axle off center then call it your own.
What is somewhat interesting is that, at least in this (very early stage) MS is claiming that this is the new basis for all their UI drawing - the often suggested "totally SVG interface" that has been bandied about on Slashdot. And to be fair, things are starting to head that way. GNOME and KDE already do SVG icons etc. So the next question is, how quickly is the FOSS community going to have something like this already implemented, because they seem to have a head start ATM (though no direct push as MS has). And when it is implemented, how similar/compatile will the implementations be...
We shall see.
Jedidiah.
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"Splash" pages and annoying ads have given Flash a bad name. As a backend programmer who has dabbled with Flash, I think it's a pretty awesome tool when used correctly. You can interact with server-side scripts (e.g. PHP/Perl) and create some very cool tools that react in real time rather than waiting for page loads. It even accepts data input in the form of XML. I think it's a bit of a toss-up on Flash menus. They can be annoying, processor-intensive, and unecessary but they can also replace horribly buggy IE-only DHTML. Part of the problem is that Flash is simple enough that almost anyone can do a hackish implementation, but it really takes some time to understand how really take advantage of the medium.
'Sparkle' is a vector designed drawing engine for APPLICATIONS inside longhorn, it is NOT being billed as a WEB standard.
Well, if you actually read anything about Longhorn, you would know that there is no difference between a native app and a web app in Longhorn. IE will support avalon rendering, so if you go to a website that uses MS's proprietary document/app format, you WILL see a Sparkle rendered page.
Scary...
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
One interesting use for SVG is the ability to define cursors in CSS level 2 revision 1 documents. You simply set your CSS cursor parameter so that it points to the URI of the SVG file which contains an SVG cursor definition. Although certainly not the most important use for SVG, it is still useful and worth noting. I can imagine that in the future there will be loads of web sites with all kinds of obnoxious cursors.
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Adobe's SVG viewer used to work in Mozilla on Linux, but not it no longer works, in post-0.99 version of Mozilla. Not because Adobe broke it, but because they trusted Mozilla enough to use one of their "unsupported" XP-COM interfaces, which Mozilla changed. [See Mozilla bug number 133567.]
Granted, Mozilla had warned Adobe that they might change the interfaces, which were not yet frozen. But Mozilla broke their side of the contract by neglecting to change the UUID of the interface, when they changed a method signature, which should be Standard Operating Procedure.
The whole point of using XP-COM (which is the COM-like plug-in system that Mozilla uses) is to protect against things like this happening. But Mozilla didn't play by the rules, and screwed Adobe after they'd already released their SVG viewer plug-in.
So everyone is screwed because Adobe's SVG viewer USED to run on Mozilla on Linux and Windows, but NOT ANY MORE. Mozilla's built-in SVG support is impressive and commendable and going in the right direction, but nowhere near enough to fill the void left behind when AdobeSVG just stopped working one day.
Mozilla moved the bug that ASVG crashes mozilla to "Evangelism", so now the ball's in Adobe's court to decide if they'll trust the Mozilla project again after having been burnt. Of course it was the Mozilla project's Overenthusiastic Evangelism that convinced Adobe to use the early plug-in interface in the first place. You have to appreciate the irony of fighting fire with fire.
In the perfect world, Adobe would have released a fix for this problem soon after the it was "Evangelized" to their attention. And I would like a pony with that. But in the real world, they're off on the next version of their SVG viewer, and don't want to think about the old version. You can get a beta of the new version for Windows, but it's unstable, and not supported on any other platform than Windows.
But if you're using Linux and want to use Adobe's SVG viewer, you have to sit around and wait, hoping that Adobe will get around to releasing the next version of their SVG viewer, and when they do it will support Linux. But there are no guarentees. The original SVG viewer for Linux was only released as beta, never officially released. And Adobe's been said to be back-pedaling on SVG and concentrating on other products.
Batik would be usable as an SVG viewer plug-in (not as efficient but almost as functional where it counts), but I haven't been able to get past the Java security restrictions to enable the ecmascript interpreter (rhino). Batik packaged as an SVG viewer browser applet (in a way that rhino worked, enabling dynamic svg) would go a long way towards rendering Adobe's proprietary SVG viewer irrelevant. But I haven't been able to figure out how to get rhino to work in an applet, or find any examples of Batik running in an applet as an interactive SVG viewer. Squiggle is not what I mean by an applet.
If anyone from Adobe is reading, and actually cares about SVG: When will the next version of Adobe's SVG viewer come out, and will it support Mozilla, Linux and Mac OS/X, as well as Windows and Internet Explorer? Or has Abobe given up on SVG?
If nobody from Adobe has anything to say about this horrible problem, I will take it as more evidence supporting the sad but persistent rumors that Adobe is back pedaling and giving up on SVG.
-Don
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