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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.
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
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.
Sparkle is a joint venture of Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern.
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].
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
Netscape lost out to IE
Apple lost out to Microsoft
AltaVista lost out to Google
WordPerfect lost out to Word
The typewriter lost out to the computer
Quark will eventually lose out to InDesign
In each example, the dominant, familiar, easy-to-use solution was replaced by the upstart.
Saying this 'can't surpass' Flash is so short-sighted and uninsightful it's making my teeth itch.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
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?
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...
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>
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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.
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?
People who compare SVG to Flash directly are missing the point. The real strength of SVG is not vector graphics (which its pretty good at). The real strength of SVG is that since its an XML-derived schema, all the available tools for dealing with and transcoding XML documents (XSLT, et al) can be used to generate SVG documents. The implications of this are slowly beginning to be understood. Imagine how many XML derivations could use this. Anything from business documents (graphs, etc), to medical records (graphically showing the timeline of a patient's medical operations, for example) can utilize these techniques.
The coolest example I can point you to is this. An XSLT stylesheet is used to transform a chess markup language into a animated SVG image. Beyond cool.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
"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.
I'll take a Microsoft standard, which at least is answerable to market forces; over stuff published by unimaginative committees anyday
It is to laugh! Unimaginative committees? Microsoft is damn near duping a standard created through the W3, and you call the committee unimaginative?
You're right, though. Who nees open standards and peer review, when there's a monopolist we can all follow like sheep.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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.
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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.
...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.
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.
It's definitely worth looking over. I had been checking out Sodipodi's last release last spring, but there still were enough rough edges to block my main needs. But with what was in CVS last month, they both jumped up to 'very handy'. And the Inkscape work has jumped things up even more.
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.
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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