Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
jeez. I do so much work on the command line, and I have to start X just to view the web these days. I really hate the prevalence of flash- and java- based sites which have no text-only view.
Ads? What ads?
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.
and is 90% identical to SVG.
Well, that goes without saying: it's from Microsoft!
Take a cool semi-new open technology. Make it incompatible with standard implentations. And call it innovation.
It's heartwarming to see open source beating Microsoft to all the cool new DESKTOP technologies.
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?
Sparkle is a joint venture of Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern.
But what about sparkle motion?
Mr. Sparkle?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Umm, people, the reason this is important is because client-side apps will be using this to draw their interfaces. WVG is the new way to do UI in Longhorn, whether it's in the browser or not.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
As usual, Microsoft ignores the standards and does its own thing. Why can't they be standards-compliant for once?
e l>e l>
...
Wait a minute...
On a serious note, someone once submitted some art to an open source video game project I run in SVG format. I thought it was pretty neat that I could resize the image without losing visual quality, but I was rather put off by the size. The file just seemed way too big for the data it contained. On a whim, I opened it up in a text editor, and what did I find? DUM DUM DUUUMMMMM.... XML!
Arg! Why!? What's next, raster images in XML? I can see it now...
<rasterImage>
<pixel>
<color>
<red type="hexidecimalValue">FF</red>
<green type="hexidecimalValue">FF</red>
<blue type="hexidecimalValue">00</red>
</color>
</pix
<pixel>
<color>
<red type="hexidecimalValue">FF</red>
<green type="hexidecimalValue">80</red>
<blue type="hexidecimalValue">80</red>
</color>
</pix
</rasterImage>
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
from the actually-its-name-is-homer dept.
I'm betting it's a reference to the long debate on the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, culminating in the great quote:
"The poems were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name!"
I see this as MS being in the back seat on this one. Sort of like PNG for everyone else. Late to the party and you don't get any cake.
WVG is exactly what the aging IE needs. With out incorporating new features Microsoft will be unable to keep up with their policy of releasing at least 1 brand new critical flaw once a year. Just imagine to power of SVG with 10% more bugs, added complexity, and lest we forget incompatibility with every other browser. WVG shows us that Microsoft can still continue to innovate by stealing other peoples ideas and branding them as their own.
Looking at their overview, this looks a lot like their previous answer to SVG - VML.
VML tied into directx. They only mention that you cannot mix GDI and Avalon in the same window because WVG is hardware rendered through Avalon. Also sounds like directx.
The only major change was that in VML it always wanted a namespace defined for it to work - like IE didn't know what to do with a VML file. WVG seems like a different way to display for generic windows applications - not just web.
Looks like microsoft is innovating by repackaging an older product into a discription language that can be called by a standard win32 app. It would be interesting to see an open source toolkit that does the same thing as WVG, but uses open standards and remains cross platform.
Anybody else wonder why the poster choose to link "SVG" (and his screen name... hmmm...) to an obviously commercial site hawking a book (learnsvg.com) rather than to the W3C SVG pages? The W3C site is certainly a better authority on the topic.
I posted this a long time ago, but somehow it is still relevant:
I figured it would only be a matter of time before Microsoft did this. I normally try to stay out of the *bash Microsoft* conversations, but after dealing with all the problems we have with the Microsoft JVM, and then having this on top of it...ugh.
Random Musings
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?
the 'Flash Click to View' plugin for Firebird.
found here (texturizer). Anything Microsoft puts out will hopefully get the same treatment.
What makes you think there wont be a visual Development Environment for SVG or WVG?
I assume this is what you mean, because theres no way in hell you'd be able to know which one is easier, because wvg/sparkel isnt out yet..
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
There's a new SVG editor under development called Inkscape - http://www.inkscape.org. It builds on the Sodipodi codebase but is focusing SVG and similar standards. For instance, the interface is being redone to be GNOME HIG-compliant - SDI instead of the Gimp/Sodipodi/Dia-like CSDI style. Worth checking out; looks like the next release will be coming out within a couple weeks.
"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.
This looks like Microsoft's traditional embrace-and-extend approach. Well, except they are making even less of a pretense of "extending" it than before--they just mostly pretend SVG doesn't exist.
The question is: given Microsoft's patent claims on the Microsoft Office XML file formats, will they try to patent the WML formats 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...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
SVG (now a W3 standard for 3 yeras) was...
Did you mean years?
Suggestions:
years
eyras
ye ras
ye-ras
yer as
yer-as
teras
yeas
eras
ceras
yeara
eyra's
treas
yeats
terras
rras
wras
yea's
erase
tras
yeans
year's
yearns
ras
rears
yas
yes
areas
eyres
Yeah, rears, they meant rears.
When I looked into things last spring, I remember experimenting with a several small images (3-30k). I suprisingly found that the SVG versions were just as small as (and usually smaller than) raster versions, and that was without any form of compression on the XML. It all depends on what your specific content.
...doesnt that mean that the source is easily obtainable. I mean as far as I know this wvg (or svg) doesnt compile. Flash's strength is that developers can develop knowing that noone will steal their code. If wvg stays as pure xml, then its only a "right click->view source" away. Developers wont like that. If wvg does compile, then having it xml based is dumb for there are far more efficient ways of achieving the same goal, granted they may be more complicated, but in the end better.Maybe I'm missing something here, correct me if I'm wrong.
And that's as close as it is ever going to get. It can be the C# of web-pages.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
WVG is sort of a subset of Microsoft's XAML UI markup language that deals with vector graphics. Apparently the "WVG" term was not meant to be made public, and will be removed from subsequent editions of the Longhorn SDK docs.
0 3/11/04.ht ml#a153
(Microsoft blog clarifying this...)
http://www.eightypercent.net/Archive/20
"Sparkle" is supposedly the codename of a rumored Microsoft "Visual XAML" design tool.
I'm guessing WVG = fucked up SVG
this sounds familiar. m$ likes to take a standard and butcher it with [proprietary] "extensions" that only work in windows. those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. anyone who uses microsofts "sparkle" is screwing themselves
...so I feel obligated to link to the Mozilla SVG Project.
If you want to create SWF (Flash) animations, there are much cheaper alternatives to buying Flash from Macromedia. SWF is an open format, and there are other manufacturers of creation tools. Swish is one I've heard a fair bit about. Others are available for Tucows. You can even create SWF files from within PHP with the MING libraries. In short, I don't think SVG will replace SWF simply because of cost.
I wrote my impressions from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference and the new technologies presented there in:
m l
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/texts/pdc.ht
There is a potential for XAML and WVG to become standards just because of the large deployments of these technologies.
Miguel.
Every time I turn around, MS adds its own bullshit to something else. If you want to play MS, fucking WORK WITH THE TEAM THAT INVENTED IT! I'm sure the W3C would be more than happy to hear MS's ideas on what should be included. Why not be part of a wold wide standardization? Haven't years of making shitty products taught you anything?!?
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
MSHTML
MSXML
MSJava
MSCSS
MSSVG...
It was only a matter of time.
<TD BGCOLOR=#ffffff> </TD>
Its interesting to save a large image to this format and see what it does to a browser.
I can't say anything else I didn't already say here.
Matt
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.
SVG supports gzip. SVGZ files are efficient because verbose, repititious text compresses well.
Look at the filesizes in these examples. Betcha can't make PDF files that small.
Except that's exactly what it's for - SVG *is* a text-only view, or at least it lets you have one. SVG would be much more friendly to text-only browsers than, say, Flash which is just an opaque blob to lynx. An SVG aware text browser could strip out the graphic objects and just display the data in the document. An xslt style sheet could do the same...
So let me get this straight. Microsoft is taking a standard, modifying it slightly just for the sake of making it incompatible, and then foisting it upon all users and developers who use Windows, invalidating the 'standard'.
Yeah, I knew there was a reason we came up with the term "Embrace and extend"... Joy. I look forward to the mess this will create.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
Someone mod the the parent comment up. It is dead on the money. Sure, lots of adds have used flash for annoying things, but that's hardly Flash's fault. Lots of Viruses have been written in C. As a tool, Flash is still a fairly useful one, and one that fills a fairly unique niche on the internet. It's just too bad that the only face of flash that most people see these days are the "bad" examples, involving "mystery meat" menus, needless graphics and animations that must be waited through to get to content, and annoying popup adds.
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.
You'll get there quicker with some help: http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/links/gDesklets use .display files which contains XML to define the applet's display.
And as far as I know, GDM themes does this as well.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
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'.
A technology they invented and can't actually implement to the published standards.
Oh, and what about the box model, MS coders don't seem to be able to tell the difference between plus and minus.
If they can't do the basic stuff then what odds this turns out to be an incompatible and partially working mess?
And why will they switch from Flash to the MS version (WVG) instead of SVG which has been around for awhile?
I ate your fish.
Yeah, and just about as useful as those text browsers that strip out HTML formatting and display basic data.
I might be missing the point, but don't ALL vector graphics scale by definition?
This sig intentionally left justified.
Suppose stealing other peoples ideas and copying other peoples software falls under the "Right to innovate"
Although i think there might be easier grammar than XML for both humans and software, giving the user access to a fileformat in human readable form is generally a great idea. Take a look at SNG . It translates PNG raster images to XML and back. It allows users to tweak every byte of the PNG or just check if some application software put too much personal information into it.
It is one of the reasons why I prefere LaTeX over WYSIWYG-Tools. (Nice for scripting, c&p etc.)
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
WVG and is 90% identical to SVG
isn't 2/3 about 67%? I want to see the math behind this 90% FUD. Three letters...one different...two the same...2/3. Come on now.
OK, it gets a lot more complicated when you consider compression, but you get the picture. For many images, SVG is very efficient, and has the advantage that images are scaleable. In the end, it just depends on the application.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
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.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
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.
If you look around the web, you will find that there are XML-based GIS formats. Check for OpenGIS and GML. But they are not just SVG--the requirements for GIS are more complex, both in terms of storage layout and in the need for the representation of non-geometric attributes and content in GIS systems.
ROFL! Let's start a standardization group for raster images in xml ;-)
"Instead of everyone complaining about the annoying Flash ads and site designs, we'd be complaining about the annoying WVG ads and site designs."
The difference being that it's bloody easy to write a filter to remove XML tags or attribtues you don't like, such as the animation ones.
Besides, by the time SVG becomes common enough that advertisers start using it, Mozilla will have per-site mime-type blocking that'll mean you never have to watch Tom's stupid animated hammer again.
That's at least a month more recent than the last progress on XHTML.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Isn't that X3D?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.)
How interesting. Flash technology running on top flash-like technology. How difficult would it be to 'optimize' this and offer a 'better' "standalone" product than competing software makers ?
When MS undertakes anything at all, you should read: conquer all marketshare, in 8 years if possible. The only things that are not getting along as planned are their hardware divisions.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
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
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
The SVG viewer used to work fine in Mozilla, but after you upgrade Mozilla from 0.99 to 1.0, then Mozilla crashes whenever you look at an SVG file! And there is no fix in sight because Mozilla moved the bug number 133567 to "Evangelism", meaning they won't fix it even though Mozilla caused the problem by not following their own rules. So now the ball is in Adobe's court to decide if they care to ever trust Mozilla again, after having been screwed.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
But no longer. It just crashes Mozilla. So if you installed it before, make sure you uninstall it now, because otherwise you will be left wondering why your browser crashes all the time.
It will happen between the 0.99 and 1.0 releases, when you least suspect it. Upgrading Mozilla from 0.99 to 1.0 will cause it. Just when you thought everything was finally stable, SVG breaks. There are rumors of work-arounds to keep it from crashing, but none of them work. Eventually it will be unavoidable, and designers who wanted to use SVG and Mozilla and Linux will be forced to use Flash and Internet Explorer and Windows, and eventually support WVG, because they're much less trouble.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
http://catalog.com/hopkins/images/pizzatool.gif (screen snapshot)
ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/NeWS/tnt/pizzatool (source code)
ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/NeWS/tnt/pizzatool.6 (manual)
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
"Their version is basically the same, except proprietary and will be bundled with everything sold my Microsoft. The use of the "open" standard SVG will result in a lawsuit, your computer erasing the hard drive, and with Microsoft's move into also controlling the BIOS, don't even think about installing a operating system that doesn't come from Redmond.
Okay, I'll go sit back down now... "
Flamebait, or a clever satirical exploration of a typical Slashdot knee-jerk response?
"Derp de derp."
Why is it not in Mozilla properly yet?
i.e. you have to recompile your browser to get it installed.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The SVG comittee decided against the use of nested sub-elements to describe paths, because it would have such a huge overhead in the size of the file and especially all the dom elements that would be required to represent and expose it.
Where did they get this idea? From VML, which was Microsoft's previous attempt at a vector graphics markup language, which is still built into the browser. VML actually has a bunch of good ideas in it, and it can be included inline on the web page.
Here's an example of a game called "Fasteroids" that I wrote in JavaScript and VML, that only runs in Internet Explorer of couse. I recently rewrote Fasteroids for SVG, which was pretty straightforward, but I haven't posted the source to that yet. I've also implemented pie menus for SVG. Ask me if you're interested.
http://www.piemenu.com/fasteroids.html
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
FFS why cant Microsoft just go with W3C standards? as a web developer thats all i ask. The number of times I've screamed because they don't support some basic standard or do it with bugs its starting to make me go insane! I buy 3 keyboards because i go through several a year when i pick them up and smash them across my desk at MS stupidity.
All i want is HTML and CSS implemented so i can actually use it the way it was intended, it can do some amazing things and you can come up with great ways of representing and displaying things, but then MS comes along and says "yeah we design multi-threading server solutions for high capacity mission-critical business applications but no we cant handle the implementation of drawing a fucking box on the screen without screwing it up somehow" or they just don't support it at all which brings me to the next point:
Its pretty safe to say that for most mainstream sites IE is by far the most popular browser, and in some ways the standards have missed things (that SVG will fix) for example rounded/shaped corners with CSS can only be done with a hack, so if IE had a special way you could just about compromise and use it, and other browsers would just get pointy corners or you could give them different content, fine. But Microsoft doesn't even come up with useful diversions to the standards they just come up with bug-ridden pointlessness.
MS IE as pretty much shaped the web (and still does) as we know it, its a real pity that its such a crap feature-less browser that has nothing to do with standards and the philosophy behind them. Its similar to how Outlook brought us the VB script virus single handed, and singled handed also represents what Microsoft are!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Oh, wait, (s)he said "standards".
Never mind.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I'd love to have a hot-rod version of Batik rewritten in clean efficient C++. I'd also like to have an external binary plug-in facility for Batik, so you can plug in efficient rasterizers, vector and raster filter effects, video players, real time video input, etc.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Be honest, when you see a flash animation start up (besides banner ads) you look for the "Skip intro" button as fast as you can.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
now a W3 standard for 3 yeras
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
See my earlier post regarding "Longhorns Flash Killer"
...
Embrace and Extend
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I agree.
I have Flash disabled on my machine for performance/security/annoyance reasons (along with all other plug-ins (which means I can't see SVG, either (sigh)), scripting, animated GIFs, etc.).
Probably 99% of web sites that use Flash do not need to, but many, if not most of them, have no alternate means of accessing their sites.
For personal sites, this is not much of a problem, but commercial sites can (and do) lose business by not providing alternate access.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"Look, ours does everything that theirs does, PLUS a little bit more!"
Thats right, MS is hijacking a standard, just like they did with XML, huh?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Flash has tremendous database (now using SOAP) and application possibilites, and it's an OO programming environment that resembles Java (in MX2004) So it makes a smooth web application where HTML can't cut it.
Flash works identically on any platform it installs on, and installs on Win, Mac, and Linux even in moderately old version. There is no way that MS is going to 1) properly implement a programming environment that doesn't suck or 2) actually be platform independent.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
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
Microsoft is on the SVG board and contributed many technologies to it. Look at how the timing works in SVG compared to a previous MS technology called HTML_TIME. I think they might just have a common ancestor.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Adobe's delayed release of Acrobat for Linux compared with Windows and Mac, their discontinuing the Framemaker on Linux beta program suggest to me that they don't mind losing various markets in their effort to consolidate their product lines.
Why Adobe doesn't support SVG more? It's simply an XML-ification of the capabilities they already own in PDF. Innovators dilemma. It competes too much with an existing product for them to promote it with any enthusiasm.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Quote:
<Canvas ID="root" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/xaml" Background="White">
<Path Data="M 100,200 C 100,25 400,350 400,175 H 280"
Stroke="DarkGoldenRod"
StrokeThickness="3"/>
</Canvas>
I don't know very many people who like creating documents in Quark.
Quark, as far as I can tell, has better support for the crazy output devices and is therefore easier for presses and etc to use, so the print shops demand Quark from the layout people.
No amount of features available to designers will oust Quark for big jobs, until the print shops will accept something else.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
One of the problems with GUIs (particularly Windows) that I've seen discussed on /. is the fixed scale of the elements. Now, MS is introducing a completely vectorized GUI system -- so one would hope that in doing so, they would get away from the limitations of bitmaps.
So why is the fundamental unit of measure in WVG a "device-independent pixel" set to be equivalent to 96dpi? Windows already has the ability to have its screen dpi setting changed (though since it doesn't take this into account when drawing dialogs, only text, you often lose information). Why can't they then set it up so that it tries to draw based on that setting (with customizability, so that if I don't want a 3" start button I can shrink it), instead of just assuming 96dpi?
And is this a good time to ask for identificiation of the physical resoultion in the monitor's return signal (a la plug-n-play)? It would be convenient for the average user to not have to try to measure their screen and then calculate the pixels-per-inch -- why not have the monitor report its diagonal size, and let the OS compute, based on screen resolution, what the dpi should be? I know that that wouldn't be sufficiently calibrated for serious graphics applications, but then those folks (including myself) are already used to drawing a ruler on the screen and fiddling with the monitor controls until it lines up with one held up against the monitor.
But the basic question remains: Why is the fundamental unit of measurement 1/96 of an ideal inch, when few configurations actually operate at this level (eg. a 20.8"-viewable at 1600x1200, 13.3" at 1024x768). So why not make it tuned to the acutal resolution?
Breaking yet another perfectly good standard. How much of a pain is it already to have 90% CSS compatibility in IE?
The Anti-Blog
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!
I don't really grok what you're looking for, is it something like Cairo or one of the svg-libraries that depend on it?
I love the X window system.
Just kidding, although I do write a lot of things for Linux...
Name two.
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?
Support for computers from the "one processor without an MMU" range to the "hundreds of processors sharing NUMA memory" range.
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.
Name one.
i see a lot of wishful thinking out there, but Flash ain't going anywhere soon...SVG=BFD (vector graphics barely makes the Top 50 cool/useful things that FlashMX can do)
with the possible exception of their 'wonderful' visual programming tools, can anybody name a successful pro-level design tool that M$ has developed? i came from the print world, where there used to be speculaton about M$ and their new 'Adobe killers' --funny, you don't hear that one anymore...;>
I disagree.. SVG and PDF are rather different.
PDF is very much a replacement for postscript (not as a printer interface language, but rather as a document format) Like Postscript, PDF can be used to describe graphics and shapes, and that's why EPS was developed.
SVG is rather an XML-ification of the capabilities of EPS. And if I were Adobe, I'd support it; EPS is a cumbersome format to work with, since it requires a full postscript-interpreter implementation to read. EPS has suffered as a result; Few desktop apps have proper support for it.
As noted by others, SVG can be handled with existing XML libraries. It's much simpler for third-parties to implement. Full SVG support in OpenOffice is just a question of time, for instance.
Last night I watched the third portion of Children of Dune with my girlfriend, and marveled at how bad the CG in it was. It looked like something out of a babylon 5 knockoff. However, it got me to thinking about VR UI, what will it be like? Even Microsoft is now moving us to a world in which we will attempt to escape the tree structured model of data management and move to using attributes. Then the desktop metaphor will be unnecessary and outdated, and it will be time to start looking for new ways to interact with data. The Brain is fairly interesting in this regard, especially version 3 which supports link and thought types, it gives you some idea of what it could be like to have all of your programs support an advanced filesystem which in turn gave them all metadata; it's easy to see what everything is. Picture bringing up properties on a file and having ldd automatically run and put its output into a window, and then being able to click on any of those files and bring up ITS properties and find out if it's a broken link or whatever. Now picture a three dimensional view in which you can simply see all this stuff when you examine that program's properties, because of visible links. And further, because the filesystem is relational and caches all this metadata, you will be able to see all of the other parents of that library, if you zoom over to it - all of the programs which depend on it. Their metadata is cached each time they are accessed, of course.
Now, Microsoft is not an innovator themselves. They purchase innovators, though, and continue funding them. For our purposes, of course, that might as well be the same thing :) So yes I think that Microsoft is one of few companies that really "get it". They tend to implement something and then use it for everything. .NET is likely going to end up everywhere through Windows. I'm assuming that their new integration of microsoft sybase - er, I mean, SQL server - into the operating system for the purposes of filesystem enhancement is going to change many of their programs substantially, and certainly all the server products will be utilizing its new features.
Meanwhile, we do have the means to create a similar filesystem on linux. Some would say that ReiserFS already is one :) I recall from what I've read that the next version of ReiserFS essentially will be. (Aren't the database functions somewhat unimplemented in 2? Maybe I'm behind, anyway, I decided to use XFS :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Adobe, Corel, and some others have DRAWING software that supports SVG but the only IDE along the lines of FlashMX for interactive content that I know of is XStudio by EvolGrafix (http://evolgrafix.com). But they are a small company in Germany. (Adobe or Corel ought to buy these guys or at least partner with them and distribute their software in the USA.) And the last time I played with XStudio it was pretty buggy.
Corel has recently released some interesting server-side XML generation software (http://www.smartgraphics.com/default.shtml).
But on to the issue at hand:
Once Microsoft has this proprietary WVG under the covers of Longhorn, we can expect Front Page, Office, and any drawing software put out by MS to support it and IE to render it. VisualStudio will provide easy ways to generate sophisticated WVG web apps.
Then Flash will stop being installed by default in IE. WVG will start appearing all over the WWW and the 90+% of the hoi polloi who don't even know how to start a Windows Command Prompt, let alone compile a Linux kernal, will be oblivious to the fact that Microsoft has grown even larger by embracing and extending.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that Microsoft will publish their WVG standard and let others write software to generate the stuff.
In the long run, maybe this is a good thing? MS will push the WWW to vector graphics in a way that SVG has not been able to due to the lack of a powerful sugar-daddy. Maybe WVG will be incorporated into a later SVG spec?
- Jasen.
"Look, ours does everything that theirs does, PLUS a little bit more!"
Unfortunately, they convince Windows users that they're buying in to some third-party standard, but they then diverge, making their customers incompatible and pulling apart support for the standard.
Imagine all the good Microsoft could do if they'd just play nicely in the sandbox.
i am just waiting for the open software people to figure out that we are redundantly wasting time by having 50% support by batik, 50% in kde (a different 50% mind you), a differnt set of support in mozilla yet no one is near the level of support of adobe or even the corel viewer. Sad Sad I tell you.
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.
;)
You must be some kind of.. uhm.. NetAvenger!!! Yeah, that's it.
I agree with you about Flash animations and the 'skip intro' stigma. People who think that this is all Flash is capable of clearly don't know what they're talking about, as is frequently evidenced whenever Flash is mantioned around here.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm glad that the first post on this thread was made by someone who is actually aware of the fact that Flash is capable of more than just animations with a 'skip intro' button. XML parsing, video streaming and all the other cool features of Flash make me wonder why people are still comparing it to SVG.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Uh, it's backed up by an aspx page, client side and server side code.
Mantis Markup Language (MML). Then they got bought by Lycos, fired, etc.
Windows is always 5 years behind.. *sigh*
Check it out here..
Cool! Amazing Toys.
It all just goes to show you, NEVER, EVER use unsupported interfaces when developing anything that is not considered "throw away" code.
. there used to be a sig here.....
Being non-standard isn't necessarily bad.
More to the point, SVG hasn't been taking over the Web. Maybe it has some inherent flaws? If so, could it be that WVG fixes some of them? Or would MS have some other plausible excuse to be only 90% compatible, other than proprietary lock-in?
On the other hand, will WVG be independently implementable, or will it be encumbered by patents, copyrights or something the like?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Oh, hello, developer. I see you are interested in distributing Mr. Sparkle in you app. You have chosen wisely. But please - don't believe me. Observe this commercial.
You know what?
So mod me offtopic/flamebait, I'm going to do a little MS-bashing.
I don't think a whole lot of people "got it" during the trial. The browser was just one single example of MS using it's monopoly power to make competitors' products irrelevant. This is yet another example. Right now it seems like there's only room enough for once SVG format, but wait until MS throws it's weight around (like with WMP audio) and support for this format appears out of nowhere.
Examples of technology that MS copied and used in conjunction with their monopoly (and distribution) power to cripple competitors:
DR-DOS --> hardcoded Windows incompatibilities
Netscape --> IE
Groupwise/Notes --> Outlook
Sun Java --> MS Java --> MS dotNet
RealPlayer --> WMV
MPEG Layer 3 --> WMA
CD burning software --> Functionality included in XP
WinZip --> Functionality included in XP
Any lightweight editor --> MS Movie Maker
Flash SVG --> WVG
This isn't innovation. Microsoft isn't selling these things as separate items; They ship with Windows. Bringing up browser integration during the trial, but ignoring all the rest of the examples is just silly. It's still going on, and no one cares. I don't understand how someone, especially a hardline Republican, can stand for both economic growth and support Microsoft at the same time. MS is bad for business. Even if Microsoft licensed some of the technologies, it's still bad, because no competitors can get their foot in the door when MS has already included the technology in a way that it cannot be removed or replaced in the operating system. It'll never occur to end-users that there are other options.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
I'm glad to see I made your foe list. I'm proud to be there, since all it took was calling you out to support your statement (that you wrote in bold even!). What's the word I recently saw you use? Ah yes...
Fucktard.
No, that would imply anger on my part when actually I find it hilarious that you added me to your foe list. Looking at your other posts it's clear you're quite young and haven't quite mastered the art of critical thinking. I'm guessing you're 17 at the most. Anyway, continue on...you amuse me so!
If it is successful on the Windows platform; steal it, copy it; "improve" it, extend it, or as a last resort - buy it.
Everyone seems to have fallen for the old 1998 MS lie, that anything sold with the OS and some integration is a necessary part of the OS itself.
And yet, Microsoft never said this...
IE - Integrated HTML rendering engine (IE was the browser that was the front end of the engine, but applications did not have to use the IE browser and still could use the full features of the HTML rendering engine.)
Media Player (WMP7-9 just the front end to WMA and WMV codec technologies)
However, telling Microsoft that they need to cripple the OS by removing not only IE and WMP7-9, but ALSO the HTML rendering engine and the inherent sound codecs that ARE a part of the OS, is just silly and DOES break applications.
It would be like asking Microsoft not only to remove MSPAINT, but requiring them to remove the ability for Applications to call the BMP APIs in addition to removing MSPAINT.
Developers that use these technologies in Windows get this, how come no one else seems to do so?
Microsoft never said they would not Remove IE, they just said the HTML engine behind IE was a PIECE of the OS. Microsoft never said that it wouldn't remove WMP7-9, but requiring the removal the sound and video codecs does take away from the OS.
(Windows Server for example installs just fine without the Media Player, but leaves the Codecs so applications that use them are not broken).
There is a DIFFERENCE between the IE browser and the HTML rendering engine IE uses. The HTML Rendering engine was designed to be component based so that application developers could just tell the OS to display any HTML code/pages and it would know how to do it. Just like if the developer tells the OS to draw a BMP at 0,0 or a Font at 0,0.
If Microsoft is a Monopoly because of companies like Dell that sold out for the contracts to force their users to get Windows with every system bought, and DELL still does this for most of their computers.
Smart Computer retailer (like our company for example) never signed a deal to sell Windows with every PC, and our users could choose what they wanted.
So if Microsoft is a Monopoly, then no one can use a computer without using Microsoft products? Funny, I know a Lot of Linux and Mac Users that would disagree with that argument.