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SVG And The Free Desktop (s)
unmadindu writes "Christian Schaller has written an interesting article on SVG's current and possible uses on the GNU/Linux desktop. Though the article concentrates mostly on GNOME, it does mention the excellent work the KDE developers have been doing with KSVG, and refers to the upcoming SVG support in Mozilla too."
Maybe it's just me, but I'm wondering when SVG will become Flash. Or am I comparing apples and oranges here?
-What have you contributed lately?
They're great for displaying technical drawings. I'd like to see more architectual diagrams on the web, both software architecture and the physical type. With bitmapped graphics, web designers are pretty much limited to small low resolution images, dumbing down detail to a marketroid white sheet level. Vector graphics scale very well for diagrams and cad drawings.
I recently dabbled in SVG for a website. I learned with that and a dash of javascript I could completely replace a java applet with a few kilobytes of code.
SVG is finding its way into everything, browsers, icons, etc. I forsee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.
As a matter of fact that is a good analogy: MIDI vs WAV. One is intrections on how to draw the other is the final outcome.
Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters. Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.
SVG also fixes the pixelation issue, whenyou try to stretch and compress the image. As a matter of fact, do that once with a regualr image and you're working with crap. You can shrink SVG blow it up, and rotate without any kind of distortion.
It is kind of suprising it took us this long to get a cross-platform standard on how to specify how to draw shapes! But it is a good thing.
I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This could make for some really interesting desktops, if this is what I think it is. Make some interesting graphical effects within icons or as the desktop without dragging the system down. I can see a new type of desktop where the start menu is replaced by an interactive desktop background. Personally, I hate the damn start menu (including the Linux implementations) as an incredibly ineffieicient way to organize menus. But, that's just my opinion- obviously someone has to like it.
I'd like to see SVG used more frequently for all sorts of things. I'm not a big fan of XML, but it seems like it'd be quite appropriate in many situations where bitmap formats are ordinarily used. Not only would such images be scalable, but it seems like they would be much easier to manipulate (how about typing or tweaking your images with a text editor?). Drawing languages are more interesting than bitmap formats, since you can actually do things with objects instead of pixels. I would be more interested in using SVG if a more 'flattened' wrapper format could be used to contain equivalent data ("rect 0 0 50 50 blue 5") making it easier to type by hand, and avoiding bloated XML data.
"Even if you encode the text somehow, its presence would still stick out like a much larger sore thumb than, say, a message hidden in a JPG file."
But XML does give you plenty of potential hiding places for data (e.g. white-space)
Now, SVG would make a lot of sense on a
vector display. However, where could you
get a modern vector display nowadays?
They used to sell arcade machines (battlezone)
and game consoles (vectrix) with these
displays.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Some of you have remarked that MIDI has lost. Well, ear interpretations are not analogous to visual interpretations.
I was more referring about the costs to a computer of using them.
However if you do compare SVG icons to Bit-map icons, visually, the SVG icon will not only be simpler, and usually just as apealing.
Look at the SVG icon sets referenced and the background of Slax (Slackware's LiveCD) The #1 comment is "aww he's so cute". Clearly, the visual accptance is much higher to the human eye than MIDI's acceptance to the human ear.
MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.
Example (as SVG):
Now human voices are harder, but once downloaded you could just download the contents of the tree.
You could also hear brittney sing "Opps.." in her original voice or her aged voice, which would be interesting. Or even make Christina Agulera sing Spear's songs.
If you're seeing the potential of re-defining MIDI like that, surely you can see hwo awesome SVG is...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
So the fact that I use say fluxbox or windowmaker
as a windowmanager and no additional "desktop"
bloat means that I don't have a desktop
or a full GNU/Linux installation?
That is retarded.
I would suggest that GNU/Linux is (generally)
everything in your list up and including to Xwindows and some windowmanager. The desktop
stuff like KDE and GNOME are just further enhancements on top of the windowmanager.
But they should "never" be considered an
essential part of a GNU/Linux system.
Isn't Avalon broken XML to begin with? Then they need to break SVG as well to fit in.
There are a few nice SVG-GIS (geographic information services) sites out there: vienna and even nebraska
Apache Cocoon can serve generated Flash and SVG from an XML stream. It doesn't seem to have matured much on mthe Flash side and there is v.little docs
There is also the Batik SVG Toolkit
Ah, that would be what the ABBR and ACRONYM html tags are for ... please please people use them!
Well... for Inkscape I know that it's high up on the lists for some of the developers, and several of them are actually investigating various factors now.
Animation and scripting support are two things that may go in hand-in-hand, but definitely are being worked on. Of course, since it's open source, there's no hard timeline for supporting it, but I would not be supprised to see it in the CVS versions in the next quarter. The internals are being reworked now in a way that will facilitate that better.
...and of course, XDR is primarily used for situations where serialization/deserialization costs dominate (i.e. RPC).
You'll notice it's the RPC folks who are most interested in a binary XML representation.
DNA just wants to be free...
SVG is a perfect format for interactive visualizations of dynamic data.
For example, here is an interactive genealogical data visualization that was produced using XSLT transformations and published as a RESTful service via a Java servlet. The sourceforge project has more information on how the visualization was produced.
Use SVG as a medium to visually repurpose data to create your own interpretation of the world!
On the monitor I'm sitting at, at
1280x1024 (~96 dpi), I can't see individual pixels as dinguished from diagonally adjacent pixels unless I'm at half my normal viewing distance for the monitor. For printed text, you generally hold the book closer to your face, so you want better resolution.
I think that the relation will actually go the other direction; when you can size windows to fit what you're doing, there will be more call for being able to resolve details in small windows, and therefore call for better monitors. As it is, increasing a monitor's resolution, as you said, makes everything smaller and harder to see, so people wouldn't run their monitors at higher resolutions even if they were available.