SVG And The Free Desktop(s) · Slashdot Mirror

I have the gayest username ever. by Can+it+run+Linux · 2004-03-24 05:11 · Score: -1

Can it run Linux(TM)?

THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING ! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:12 · Score: -1, Troll

Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING

Yes that's right, THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING. Why you might ask? Well it's simple!

Your brain usually takes care of breathing FOR you, but whenever you remember this,
YOU MUST MANUALLY BREATH! If you don't you will DIE.

There are also MANY variations of this. For example, think about:

BLINKING!

SWALLOWING SALIVA!

HOW YOUR FEET FEEL IN YOUR SOCKS!

In conclusion, the THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING troll is simply unbeatable.
These 4 words can be thrown randomly into article text trolls, into sigs, into anything, and once seen, WILL FORCE
THE VICTIM TO TAKE CARE OF HIS BREATHING MANUALLY! This goes far beyond the simple annoying or insulting trolls of yesteryear.

In fact, by EVEN RESPONDING to this troll, you are proving that IT HAS CLAIMED ANOTHER VICTIM -- YOU!

no one wants it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:12 · Score: -1, Flamebait

no one wants it, they didnt want it 6years ago and they don't want it now

perhaps this team should look at developing with VRML

Re:no one wants it by AKAImBatman · 2004-03-24 05:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think that's a bit unfair. I for one would be happy if SVG was better supported as a web technology. The advantages to it becoming a standard is that useful, zoomable, interactive charting could be done easily on the client side. Just a little XML on the server side and then let the client deal with it. Right now I use Batik to render the SVG XML to PNG images before sending them to the client. Of course, the client can't zoom in on interesting areas like they can with pure SVG.

--
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Re:no one wants it by smittyoneeach · 2004-03-24 05:31 · Score: 5, Funny

let the client deal with it

Famous Last Web Development Words

--
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Re:no one wants it by RLiegh · 2004-03-24 05:53 · Score: 1

I would be happy if I found out I won the lottery, but that ain't going to happen either. For a variety of reasons, SVG has lost out to more proprietary options; and while you and I lose out as linux users - we can't pretend that the market has made its' decision.
Re:no one wants it by firewrought · 2004-03-24 06:03 · Score: 2, Informative
SVG has lost out to more proprietary options.... the market has made its' decision.
Two points:
1. Possesive "it" does not need an apostrophe.
2. Flash is the main alternative right now because it long predates SVG in terms of practical software support. No biggie... the Flash format is documented and open. Pre-render the SVG into Flash for web clients that don't know SVG. Meanwhile, SVG is so useful that it's going to find it's way into Internet Explorer, probably through Microsoft and, failing that, through Adobe [actually, Adobe already has an SVG plugin for IE, IIRC].
--
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Re:no one wants it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:13 · Score: 1, Informative

no one wants it

Not quite true.

Vodafone will start putting SVGT 1.2
on 3 out of 4 tiers of their data enabled live! handsets
(on all except the very low end tier)
in October 2004.

The Japanese Navy by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:12 · Score: -1, Offtopic

My, the Japanese Navy sure can dance!

Note: if you follow that link and your browser does not show a video, then your browser sucks, or the Japanese Navy's web design sucks, or both.

SVG & Steganogrpahy? by bc90021 · 2004-03-24 05:13 · Score: -1, Insightful

From the article:

"Because it is an XML based file format, SVG allows the creator to conveniently embed arbitrary information inside of the file."

Granted, I'm guessing that the author is referring to graphics related information inside the file, but surely since it's just XML it could be used to embed just about any text or text-encoding?

--
libertarianswag.com

Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by MisterFancypants · 2004-03-24 05:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

Steganography? Are you going for a keyword karma whoring? Because your post is just silly. Who would try to embed some secret information in an XML file when the whole purpose of XML is so the files can easily be edited in an arbitrary text editor? It doesn't make any practical sense... 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.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by conrausch · 2004-03-24 05:21 · Score: 2, Informative

This is not really how it is supposed to work. The cool thing about steganography is, that you might not even know, that a picture has a message encrypted in it, because the data is there any way. since XML is clear text, one could easily see any encrypted text in it, as it is NOT clear text... of course, you could put tags with encrypted text in it that wouldnt get displayed, and as probably only few people would bother reading the source of a svg file, only few people would find out. but if you want to, you can have the pure ciphertext and run cryptographic attacks on it. So it is not really anything like steganography, you could as well hide your encrypted text in the comments of a pdf file or whatever...
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by twanvl · 2004-03-24 05:21 · Score: 2, Informative

I think the author is refering to the embeding of other types of XML in a SVG image. You can for example use HTML and MathML inside an SVG file, or even your own XML based data format.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Trigun · 2004-03-24 05:22 · Score: 5, Funny

I hear Osama is hiding in a specifically crafted xml document.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by temojen · 2004-03-24 05:23 · Score: 2, Informative

Yes, you could embed any data (including scripts), and with a ECMAScript capable renderer, even use it to generate the image (for graphs etc).

That's not what steganography is, though. I suggest you review what steganography is.

A big blob of <[CDATA[ would stick out like a sore thumb in an SVG. It's best to stick with embedding int Tiffs and Wavs.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by bc90021 · 2004-03-24 05:29 · Score: 1

I didn't say it had to be "secret". The point is that who would be looking in images? How many people outside Slashdot would even know that that was possible?

--
libertarianswag.com
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by AntonyBartlett · 2004-03-24 05:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

"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)
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:39 · Score: 0

It's not exactly an unknown procedure. My local newspaper had a column about it, for crissakes. Any half-decent image manipulation tool will happily display file comments (which is what your "steganography" would be).

Which won't stop the artists-of-the-slightly-funny-deal from bundling an image-comment reader in their $50 "people-are-watching-you-OMG" software package.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Saint+Stephen · 2004-03-24 05:44 · Score: 1

Has anyone ever written any steganography which hides text in plain sight? I.e., a somewhat normal looking piece of text, which contains encoded, different data. Don't answer funny, you see what I'm getting at.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by JohnFluxx · 2004-03-24 05:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

Well duh, the whole point steganography is that you can't prove the data is even there.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Reducer2001 · 2004-03-24 05:52 · Score: 1

Sure, that's been happening for years.

--
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by damballah · 2004-03-24 06:06 · Score: 1

Embedding text inside a picture and encrypting is pretty useless and dangerous anyway. If the text is encrypted, it is more easily detectable. The reason: most encryption algorithms begin with a characteristic block, like "BEGIN SHA 1 " (hence, all one has to do is scan the picture for the string containing "BEGIN SHA 1") which indicates 2 things: there is a hidden text, and it is encrypted, and the algorithm used is SHA. One could run a dictionary attack on the text, and decrypt it.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:22 · Score: 0

I hear he has his own namespace:

xmlns:osama="http://osama.bin.org/osama/1.0"
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by J'raxis · 2004-03-24 06:59 · Score: 2, Informative

Data that's encrypted for transport through a text-only environment (e.g., email), and to be decrypted by a piece of software supporting multiple ciphers, looks like that -- a header describing what kind of encryption you're using, followed by the encrypted data, which is encoded using the base64 algorithm.

But the encrypted data itself, after stripping the header and de-base64ing it, just looks like random binary noise.

If your recipient knew what encryption algorithm you were going to use to encrypt, you could just leave the header off, and if you're hiding the encrypted data in an image format that allows binary data (SVG, being XML, doesn't, but most image formats, such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, are binary), you wouldn't even need to base64 it.

--
Liberty in your lifetime
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by cubic6 · 2004-03-24 07:49 · Score: 1

That's true, but it still kinda sticks out like a sore thumb. The way I'd recommend doing it is hard-wrapping the text and using spaces at the end of each line past a certain column to encode the information. You could probably encode it in source code by selectively using a mix of tabs and spaces for indentation too ;)

--
Karma: Contrapositive
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 08:44 · Score: 0

That's what SNOW does (see link in other post in this thread).
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by AstroDrabb · 2004-03-24 08:48 · Score: 1

Who would try to embed some secret information in an XML file when the whole purpose of XML is so the files can easily be edited
You must have missed all the /. articles on MS's "open" XML format. They just stuff proprietary encoded junk into the XML file for parts of their office documents that they don't want competitors to be able to interoperate with. Simple things in the document stay plain text with XML markup, but that hidden stuff stays binary and just gets base64 encoded and added to the XML.

--
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 08:51 · Score: 0

Yes, it is relatively easy to do this, but not in a public key kind of fashion.

One way to do it is to have a template, as it were, that tells which words to pull out of a given text to make the message.

Another is to use plain-text words (it's still gibberish, but readable gibberish) as "pointers" to a separate dictionary. For example, "Meat Puppet Martha Stewart" could translate in your dictionary to "Bring Home a gallon of milk", when you put the words together.

Yet another is to have an algorithm, say, "the first letter of each sentence is a letter of a word", as used in "Quicksilver". So, while "TFLOESILOW" isn't much of a word, someone sufficiently adept at it could probably do readable text with this method to encrypt shorter messages.

Or, perhaps the first word of each sentence is used.

I would say that these are all forms of stenography.

One common trick that was used in many of the spy books I read was to embed messages in classified ads, say, in the personals section. "Joe, your sister has really laid a golden egg! Call home now!", could mean, "Agent X, abort mission. Contact for new mission briefing." Or, an agreed-upon number, such as the dow jones industrial average closing number, is used by both parties to index their code book...
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by damballah · 2004-03-24 09:17 · Score: 1

But the encrypted data itself, after stripping the header and de-base64ing it, just looks like random binary noise.
Sure, it is undecipherable. But one misses the point of steganography. That was my point.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by Saint+Stephen · 2004-03-24 09:30 · Score: 1

Yeah, that kind of thing is obvious. What I was looking for was an algorithm which would encode an arbitrary secret into a meaningful block of text. Bonus points if I can specify that block of text beforehand. No pre-sharing of secrets. You know, the whole 9 yards, same as with the binary kind.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by AntonyBartlett · 2004-03-24 11:19 · Score: 1

That's true, but it still kinda sticks out like a sore thumb.
It does indeed, very true - but then what I wrote above was a parlour-game which was meant to be spotted, and it's meaning figured out - and not proper steganography where the intention is the converse.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by subtropolis · 2004-03-24 19:15 · Score: 1

That's actually a very old method of passing messages. I can't remember the exact term for it, though. It's also the method used for the 'Bible Code', 'Cipher of Genesis', and other such quackery (you could do the same thing with the Curious George books, too, if the series were long enough :-).

What you do is have your msg. receiver(s) obtain a specific edition of some book (one which won't seem out of place with that individual). Next, prepare your message. Go through, letter by letter, and match them with 'random' letters (optionally after some other enciphering has been performed) from your book. Count down by line, over by letter, including spaces.

Now, you've got yourself a numerical ciphertext. Do some other post-processing - turn the string into BigDecimals, ROT-13 it, whatever. You can also count letters left-to right and/or bottom-to-top for fun. The important thing is that this all be established with the receiver, obviously.

Now, you just send the message. Use one-time pads for one last change. The book - together with all the other encoding steps - is your key. The receiver just deciphers the message by reversing the process. The more different steps, the more difficult the message will be to decipher.

But the book is the most important part of the key. If someone figures out all of the other steps, they've still got to figure which book (and edition) was used. I'm sure this method is still widely used. Very lo-fi.

--
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy? by subtropolis · 2004-03-24 19:19 · Score: 1

Just to clarify - you're sending the *key*. The message (*all* of your messages) is 'in plain sight', within the copy of Moby Dick over on the shelf.

--
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.

Frist Prost by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:13 · Score: -1, Offtopic

At it again!

Here's a real bleeding-edge idea.. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:13 · Score: 0, Troll

1) Make decent icons to begin with.
2) Use a decent scaling algorithm that preserves quality.

Re:Here's a real bleeding-edge idea.. by temojen · 2004-03-24 05:33 · Score: 4, Insightful

2) Use a decent scaling algorithm that preserves quality.

The best way to do this is with vector based graphics, which is what SVG is.
Re:Here's a real bleeding-edge idea.. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:23 · Score: 0

Your #2 is sooooo easy, why don't you just end your post with

3) Profit!

SGI by panthro · 2004-03-24 05:13 · Score: 3, Informative

I remember SGI's 4DWM having completely vector based graphics back in 1992 (and probably before that). Has anyone else done it in the interim?

--
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:22 · Score: 0

looks like bitmapped fonts to me...
Re:SGI by james+b · 2004-03-24 05:29 · Score: 1

So, the graphics aren't completely vector based, but the icons are - in that screenshot, the icons in the Icon Catalog and the one at top left are vector-based. The three icons at top-right are bitmaps though (they're minimised applications, which always seem to get bitmap icons).

One interesting thing is that 4DWM recently got antialiasing on the SVG icons, which looks pretty sweet.
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:42 · Score: 0

Maybe the icons are vector, but the rest of that looks like Plain Old Motif.
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:44 · Score: 1, Funny

I remember SGI's 4DWM having completely vector based graphics back in 1992 (and probably before that). Has anyone else done it in the interim?
Seeing that the 1992's screenshot you gave have netscape on it is very impressive as Netscape was released in 1994
Re:SGI by enjo13 · 2004-03-24 05:44 · Score: 1

The windows metafile format (think powerpoint, word art, etc..) is most definitely a vector format.

--
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
Re:SGI by panthro · 2004-03-24 05:48 · Score: 1

It's a screenshot of 4DWM. I didn't say the screenshot itself was from 1992.

--
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:50 · Score: 0

Well, then, the screenshot was taken in 1994 while the 4DWM code was written in 1992.

Wait a minute, that's UNIX!!! I KNOW THAT!!!

*flys through filesystem*
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:50 · Score: 0

Stay cool. I was just trolling a little...
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:00 · Score: 0

Nope.

It's just capable of holding both vector and bitmap data,
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:45 · Score: 0

Try IRIX yourself on some Indy. They're cheap anyway and pretty common. You'll notice the icons are really SVG's.

At least that's what i found out on IRIX 6.2 and IRIX 6.5.
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 07:10 · Score: 0

Don't do that again, prickhead

Just kidding, NOT, or? ;)
Re:SGI by ajs · 2004-03-24 07:29 · Score: 1

Vector graphics have been with us since the beginning of electronic computing (the earliest systems used oscilliscopes, which were fundamentally a vector device). Formats for describing vector-oriented graphics have existed for as long in the form of everything from Logo to PostScript to SVG.

Desktops based on vector graphics have included NeWS and (as you mention, but to a lesser extent) 4DWM.

SVG on Gnome is not interesting because it's new, it's interesting because we've reached a point where it now really makes sense to describe all of these high-level objects on our desktops with something other than bitmapped graphics. It's just a matter of the abstraction existing before the complexity which necessitated it.
Re:SGI by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-25 00:20 · Score: 0

Ooops. I just did it again.
Re:SGI by spitzak · 2004-03-25 03:34 · Score: 1

*ALL* graphics formats designed for non-photo images contained the ability to store vectors, so this is no big deal. The first drawing programs in the 1950's stored vectors!

What they are talking about is the use of vectors to store images for all the little icons and buttons and fonts and other pieces of the GUI. I think if you look at your old copy of PowerPoint you will see that all the buttons on the toolbar are bitmaps and they cannot scale.

woot by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:13 · Score: -1, Troll

Looks good :-D

stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

Would it have killed you to say Scalable Vector Graphics once in the article?

Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:34 · Score: 1, Informative

No kidding. I do machine learning, and EVERY TIME this comes up, I immediately think Support Vector Machine... No. Support Vector ... Graphics? OK, that makes sense, but wait. What is a support to an image designer? And why are graphics so important for (this field of) AI?

Wait, oh, I know! This is an algorithm for synthesizing new images based on user response to previous images!

Oops. Wishful thinking. It's just vector graphics. Really, how many formats for this HAVE there been already? I'm glad W3 wasn't around before - we'd still be trying to develop ASCII.
Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:43 · Score: 0

What's that have to do with the Saturn V Gantry?!!!
Re:stupid acronyms by TheTomcat · 2004-03-24 05:58 · Score: 1

If it was about raster images, would you expect him to say "Graphics Interchange Format" and "Joint Photohraphic Experts Group" ?

I wouldn't.

S
Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:05 · Score: 3, Informative

I would have. This is proper technique when writing an article - identify the acronym the first time you use it. Not everyone who reads an article is intimately familiar with the subject. Some of us, in fact, read articles so that we can learn about a topic we're not familiar with.
Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:17 · Score: 0

Oops. Wishful thinking. It's just vector graphics. Really, how many formats for this HAVE there been already? I'm glad W3 wasn't around before - we'd still be trying to develop ASCII.

stupid eh....then tell me what is this ASCII thing or W3 for that matter?

Or were you trying to be funny?
Re:stupid acronyms by irokitt · 2004-03-24 07:22 · Score: 1

Not only would we be waiting on ASCII, but it would have 24-bit characters rather than 7.

--
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Re:stupid acronyms by UnknowingFool · 2004-03-24 07:24 · Score: 4, Funny

Would it have killed you to say Scalable Vector Graphics once in the article?
You must be new here. This is /. It it's not an acronym, it's not worth mentioning.

--
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Re:stupid acronyms by foolip · 2004-03-24 07:34 · Score: 2, Informative

3rd paragraph:
For those of you unfamiliar with SVG, it is a file format for scalable vector graphics ...
Re:stupid acronyms by Flossymike · 2004-03-24 07:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

Ah, that would be what the ABBR and ACRONYM html tags are for ... please please people use them!
Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 07:37 · Score: 0

Yeah, I have to agree, but this is in the nature of nerd communication. People sometimes give nerds the benefit of the doubt, but the truth is probably that they can't communicate because they lack the intelligence to do so. It's becoming increasingly clear that a large number of people attracted to computer technology are carriers for autism and have subtle expressions of that disease. In Silicon Valley, where a lot of geeky guys have married geeky women, there has been a sky rocketing incidence of cases of severe autism.

So, next time you read an article by a geek and wonder about some weirdness in the style, or wonder why the documentation for some Linux app sounds like it was written by an autistic 6th grader, be patient; it's quite possible the writer is in fact slightly autistic, with 6th grade general intelligence (but also some savant-ish technical skills).

By the way, I have a PhD in math, so I'm usually viewed as one of incomprehesible nerds by my peers.
Re:stupid acronyms by Bitseeker · 2004-03-24 09:27 · Score: 1

Headline: TLA & FLA supplant English usage on WWW, IRC, IM. General population befuddled. CHTRFA
Footnote: TLA = Three Letter Acronym, FLA = Four Letter Acronym, WWW = World Wide Web, IRC = Internet Relay Chat, IM = Instant Messaging, CHTRFA = Click Here To Read Full Article
Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 09:44 · Score: 0

> Would it have killed you to say Scalable Vector Graphics once in the article?

I guess not. It would be much clearer if he said "Scalable Vector Graphics"... uh, ah, it's you... what? what you're doing with this knife? N-n-n-n-no, stop! Aiiiieeeeeeeeeeee...
Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 13:41 · Score: 0

Anyone who didn't know what SVG stands for should have immediately closed their browser and slashed their wrists with a broken AOL CD. Seriously when a new or arcane technology is being discussed, it is arrogant not to define the acronym at least once in an article discussing. I thought it meant Seriously Vengeful Geek, or Somewhat Vague Generality. Have a little more consideration for non-tekky readers and a little less condescencion toward them.
Re:stupid acronyms by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 13:45 · Score: 0

I bow to your superior knowledge base and underlying genetic makeup, or did you merely read something I didn't? KMA
Re:stupid acronyms by AdeBaumann · 2004-03-24 19:19 · Score: 1

Nah... there's no such thing as a FLA. You probably mean an ETLA (Extended Three-Letter Acronym). Of course, there's also the VETLA (Very Extended...) as the DUB-TLA (Doubled TLA).

--
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.

I used to work with Christian Schaller by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:14 · Score: -1, Offtopic

He is a really smart and interesting guy. He does have a nasty habit of picking his nose and eating the booger thought. Pretty gross.

Re:I used to work with Christian Schaller by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:16 · Score: -1, Troll

What's a "booger thought"?

Yay SVG! by SoTuA · 2004-03-24 05:14 · Score: 1

Here's hoping we get an all-SVG desktop years before MS, and leave windows biting the dust of the now-too-small-to-see icons by way of better and better monitors.

At least until longhorn...

Re:Yay SVG! by pNutz · 2004-03-24 05:51 · Score: 2, Insightful

Indeed. Longhorn's vector graphics break the SVG standard, "because SVG did not integrate well with Avalon"--even though SVG is XML, like Avalon. You'd think with 400 developers working on Avalon, they would find a way to integrate it...

I'm sure they'll go out of their way to make it difficult to convert between their screwy system and the W3 standard. Hopefully someone will hack out a converter. And this IS important, for companies that don't want to rewrite all their vector graphics to port something to Linux. Reusing icons on different platforms used to be the easiest part.

--
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
Re:Yay SVG! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:10 · Score: 1, Interesting

Isn't Avalon broken XML to begin with? Then they need to break SVG as well to fit in.
Re:Yay SVG! by gaijin99 · 2004-03-24 11:01 · Score: 1

Yup. Typical MS "we make standards to lock you in" behavior. Eris forbid that they should actually use the real standards that are developed.
OTOH this sort of thing might bite them. The SVG standard is being used with several projects, including projects for Windows based machines, if MS doesn't support real SVG icons it might wind up hurting them a bit. I have little doubt that someone will kludge up a converter, but they shouldn't have to. That's why we have standards.
Heh. Just realized that means MS doesn't have standards ^_^

--
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Re:Yay SVG! by turgid · 2004-03-24 20:48 · Score: 1

Here's hoping we get an all-SVG desktop years before MS, and leave windows biting the dust of the now-too-small-to-see icons by way of better and better monitors.
We can dream. Most people will remain completely unaware that it can be done until Microsoft copies it. That is the way of the world.

--
Stick Men

WTF? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:14 · Score: -1, Troll

GNU/Linux desktop??? I thought GNU/Linux was the kernel? The ?n*x world is confusing, I have a couple boxen I want to try ?n*x on (especially with the latest Winblows virii), but once I thought I had handle on the terms, it gets all weird again. Isn't KDE the desktop, and GNU/Linux the kernel?

Re:WTF? by temojen · 2004-03-24 05:30 · Score: 5, Informative
- Linux is the Kernel
- GNU is the most common core utilities and Libraries
- X handles the mouse, keyboard, and monitor
- KDE, GNOME, Blackbox, or twm (etc) is the desktop or window manager
Yes, I do know it was a troll.
Re:WTF? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:48 · Score: 0

Then why did you respond, dumbass?!

Really? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:15 · Score: -1, Troll

Christian Schaller has written an interesting article...

Guess it depends on what you call interesting. Me, I really find myself not giving a piss in the wind about it.

funny shit by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:16 · Score: -1, Offtopic

you fucking teabagging ball-goblin.

Attn: Lockheed Martin Employees Valley Forge PA by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:17 · Score: -1, Offtopic

FYI If you check the Third Floor Men's room 2nd stall from the left you will find a huge 16 inch turd I left there. I did not flush or use toilet paper so others can enjoy this gastrointestinal jewel. You may want to take photos or even go "spear fishing" and have a nibble of the chocolate treasure. Enjoy!

Re:Attn: Lockheed Martin Employees Valley Forge PA by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:22 · Score: -1, Offtopic

holy shit! this dude wasn't kidding, and the fucking turd was jet-black. However, the asshole in janitorial flushed the toilet. Subsequently, the turd magically exploding into oblivion.

Right right, good good... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:18 · Score: -1, Offtopic

...But could they at least not preface the name with K? Kthx.

Mozilla's native svg support project by pinkUZI · 2004-03-24 05:18 · Score: 3, Informative

The article mentions several ongoing SVG projects. Worth mentioning is Mozilla's efforts in this arena.

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Re:Mozilla's native svg support project by Zardoz44 · 2004-03-24 05:51 · Score: 1

And the article felt that it was worth mentioning as well:
The Mozilla SVG project started as part of the Crocodile Mathematics project, although its checkin to Mozilla CVS didn't happen until December 2001
Granted, you provide a more direct link, but the mention was there.
Re:Mozilla's native svg support project by hysterik · 2004-03-24 08:32 · Score: 1

I tried using the Firefox build with SVG to connect to SWB Smartpages (which is now using SVG). I get unknown MIME type for application/svg-xml.

I wasn't aware until seeing this on /. that Linux could handle SVG. I was only aware of the Adobe SVG client. Earlier I went to their website for SVG plugins, and noticed they had a beta version for Redhat Linux 7-9. So, apparently Adobe has something for Linux SVG.
Re:Mozilla's native svg support project by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 11:41 · Score: 0

You need to use a fresh profile for firefox. If you don't the mimeTypes.rdf file from an older version may not have the svg entries in it.

JAADEA by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:18 · Score: 4, Funny

Just another article that doesn't explain the acronym.

Re:JAADEA by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:36 · Score: 0

TLA AFU
Re:JAADEA by UserGoogol · 2004-03-24 14:11 · Score: 1

ROTFL (IMNSHO) HAND

--
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor

if (SVG = Flash) .... by Dysan2k · 2004-03-24 05:19 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?

Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by tepples · 2004-03-24 05:31 · Score: 5, Informative

SVG replaces PDF (Acrobat format). SVG plus SMIL replaces SWF (Flash format), as replacing SWF for use in animated presentations such as this or this needs audio and animation.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by gnuzip · 2004-03-24 05:38 · Score: 1

I really hope not! SVG is a great thing, but if it is abused in the way that Flash is, it'll spoil it all. SVG: "good", Flash: "bad". SVG has the potential to create many good opportunities for web graphics and other non-photograph images, but Flash can only be used for evil. If the two were to meet (or if 'MVG' appeared ;), the world would be in trouble.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by pldms · 2004-03-24 05:41 · Score: 4, Informative

SVG replaces PDF (Acrobat format). SVG plus SMIL replaces SWF..

That's a pretty fair summary, although SVG can be animated without SMIL, using the animation elements. If you add javascript and DOM into the mix you can get interactive applications, like FOAFNaut.

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Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by arcanumas · 2004-03-24 05:45 · Score: 1

Badger badger Badger? Mushroom ,mushoom? Snaaake?
WTF!? What is this. Is this some reference to a serial, a comic, a movie?
It doesn't make any sense.

--
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by photon317 · 2004-03-24 05:48 · Score: 1

Well, for one, obviously the author of badgerbadgerbadger.com has access to some seriously high quality psychodelic drugs. If you listen closesly though, you'll notice that the audio never says the word badger. The "badger" part of the song is just a rythmic sound. But you're staring at badgers, and you're at badgerbadgerbadger.com, so your mind convinces you that it must be saying badger.

--
11*43+456^2
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by uncommonlygood · 2004-03-24 05:49 · Score: 1

SVG has animation capabilities, but being a replacement for Flash isn't really the point.

The most useful aspect I can see is it will allow web clients to zoom in and out of images to their hearts' content. This means that when you think the text on a web page is too small, you can use the zoom in function and instead of just getting massive writing and tiny images, you would get nice big images as well so you can read the text on the image-based navigation bar.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:52 · Score: 0

With scripting, it is like flash in xml and not (as one poster suggested) a replacement for PDF, other wise why would adobe be the main plugin producer and exponent of cool demos?

AC
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by juhaz · 2004-03-24 05:56 · Score: 1, Insightful

SVG can never become as annoying as Flash infestation, even if used for same purposes.

Considering that any SVG support will probably be in browsers themselves, not plugins, SVG-menus and animations and the like could gracefully degrade, and would work seamlessly with rest of the UI instead of stealing the show.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by james_underscore · 2004-03-24 06:05 · Score: 1

PDF is for sending printable documents across the internet.
Flash is for making animated presentations / games / graphical webpages.
SVG is simply a special type of graphic file like a GIF, JPEG or PNG, except unlike those formats, SVGs are vector graphics, which means they can be scaled as much as you want without going "blocky" or "fuzzy" like raster graphics (e.g. GIF, JPEG, PNG) do.
The uses of these three types of file are completely seperate and none of them are a possible substitute for another.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by tepples · 2004-03-24 06:24 · Score: 1

PDF is just a multi-page vector graphics format whose page sizes usually match sizes of common papers.

SVG plus SMIL (to sync the audio with the animation) plus DOM scripting can be used for "animated presentations / games / graphical webpages."
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:34 · Score: 0

Although they are both vector based they do work in fundamentally different ways.

However they both have advantages and disadvantages over each other. For one SVG is more re-usable, i.e. it works with CSS also it's totally accessible as a searchable resource, flash is neither of these. Flash is quicker, less bulky, however compression can be added to SVG. Personally I'd love to see SVG take over from Flash....but who knows.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by leandrod · 2004-03-24 06:38 · Score: 3, Interesting

> SVG replaces PDF

Now why would PDF need replacement?
I bet any PDF page will have a smaller file size and better performance than the SVG equivalent.
Not to mention EPS.

--
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Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by FuzzyBad-Mofo · 2004-03-24 06:41 · Score: 1

You think that's weird, check out Badger2 by the same guy..
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by k98sven · 2004-03-24 06:52 · Score: 4, Insightful

SVG replaces PDF (Acrobat format)

No, it doesn't.

PDF (Portable Document Format) replaced PostScript as a page description language. Basically describing a printed page. PDF (and PS) both support vector graphics.

Whereas SVG is only a vector graphics format, it does not handle page layout and the other things required for printed page description.

If anything SVG replaces EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), which is the postscript language applied to an independent graphics object, as opposed to an actual printed page.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by tepples · 2004-03-24 06:55 · Score: 1

Whereas SVG is only a vector graphics format, it does not handle page layout and the other things required for printed page description.

Image width: 8.5 inches. Image height: 11 inches. What uncertainty remains as to how to layout this SVG Print image onto a printed U.S. Letter size page?
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Webmonger · 2004-03-24 07:01 · Score: 1

PDF can reproduce a layout exactly, because it supports embedding fonts. AFAIK, SVG does not support embedding fonts, so reproducing a layout exactly would mean writing the font outlines as vectors.

PDF also support other functionality, such as forms and embedded files. SVG does a lot of what PDF does, but I really hope it doesn't become a PDF replacement, since a complete replacement would require such features.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by GlassUser · 2004-03-24 07:31 · Score: 1

Wrong way around. Flash will continue to disappear into oblivion.

--
funny munging
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by tepples · 2004-03-24 07:56 · Score: 1

AFAIK, SVG does not support embedding fonts, so reproducing a layout exactly would mean writing the font outlines as vectors.

Can't an SVG image include subroutines? Can't an SVG export plug-in embed quadratic and cubic spline fonts as vectors in subroutines?
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by pjacobi · 2004-03-24 08:01 · Score: 1

If SVG replaces PDF, it should better have all possibilities Postscript has.

So, can anybody please teach me, how I get dimensions of a rendered text string? E.g. for
drawing a reasonably matching ellipse around it?

I know how to do this in Postscript. AFAIK I can't do it in SVG.

Peter
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Mr.+Piddle · 2004-03-24 08:20 · Score: 1

SVG + JavaScript + DOM + XHTML + CSS (in all their various incarnations) = a very nice sounding platform no one knows how to use.

--
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Webmonger · 2004-03-24 08:38 · Score: 1

Yes, it could.

That would make it contain less information than an equivalent PDF, since it would no longer contain the text-as-text. That would be unfortunate, since it would become less editable than a normal SVG or even a PDF document. One of the neat things about these standards is the fact that everything is editable.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 08:53 · Score: 0

Actually SVG does support embedding fonts. In fact it has it's own font format where the various glyphs are described using... SVG ;)

As for SVG + forms there has actually been a fair amount of work in this area. The current thinking is to create an analog of XUL using SVG for the rendering. There is something already implemented in the Adobe SVG beta called RCC that allows one to describe how your custom XML markup should be rendered and how it should behave.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by embedded files but I suspect you are refering to embedded Raster images (like JPEG's) if so these are also already part of SVG. All SVG UA are required to support the 'data' protocol for URL's which allows images to be encoded directly in the href.

I don't know why having a single standard that can handle a wide range of use cases is a problem. The standard already distinguishes between 'static' SVG and 'dynamic' SVG so you don't have to have scripting to have SVG be useful.

It really is a very cool standard!
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 08:58 · Score: 0

var t = document.getElementById("myText");
var len = t.getComputedTextLength();

-- or --

var bbox = t.bbox;
var len = bbox.width; // Assuming LTR text
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by tepples · 2004-03-24 08:59 · Score: 1

Have you mentioned the lack of a way to embed fonts while preserving editability of text to anybody at W3C? What reason was given not to allow calls to a subroutine for each character of a string?
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by tyrione · 2004-03-24 09:10 · Score: 1

Somehow after looking at the SVG Print Spec I see them interfacing with PDF not replacing PDF.

PDF/PS and their already established PPDs for Printer Dumb Devices should be leveraged, not reinventing the wheel and attempting to debunk and open standard with another open standard.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by k98sven · 2004-03-24 09:33 · Score: 1

SVG Print is not what is normally meant by 'SVG',
namely the SVG 1.1 spec.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by WorldMage · 2004-03-24 09:33 · Score: 1

Sure you can, using JavaScript:

var t = document.getElementById("myText");
var len = t.getComputedTextLength();

-- or --

var bbox = t.bbox;
var len = bbox.width; // Assuming LTR text

--
The only difference between theory and practice is that in theory there isn't any.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by WorldMage · 2004-03-24 09:37 · Score: 1

Actually SVG does support embedding fonts. In fact it includes it's own font format where the various glyphs are described using what else? SVG. These are "real fonts" still so text just references the embedded SVG font and text stays text. A user agent is free to support alternate font formats but the only format UA's are required to support is SVG.

As for SVG + forms there has actually been a fair amount of work in this area. The current thinking is to create an analog of XUL using SVG for the rendering. There is something already implemented in the Adobe SVG beta called RCC that allows one to describe how your custom XML markup should be rendered and how it should behave.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by embedded files but I suspect you are refering to embedded Raster images (like JPEG's) if so these are also already part of SVG. All SVG UA are required to support the 'data' protocol for URL's which allows images to be encoded directly in the href.

I don't know why having a single standard that can handle a wide range of use cases is a problem. The standard already distinguishes between 'static' SVG and 'dynamic' SVG so you don't have to have scripting to have SVG be useful.

It really is a very cool standard!

--
The only difference between theory and practice is that in theory there isn't any.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by tepples · 2004-03-24 09:46 · Score: 1

Still, what sane program would layout an 8.5" by 11" SVG on a U.S. Letter page other than in the most obvious way?
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 12:01 · Score: 0

I highly doubt that flash will fade into oblivion. I just attended the SCORM plugfest in zurich and 98 percent of the content creators use flash technology. Why? Simply put there is no other technology that is as flexible: i can create complex branching logic, animated diagrams, user controlled simulations, import xml data, output data, connect to webservices, stream mp3's, display video, show 3d models, manage text, have access to dropdown menues, radio buttons, sliders etc. There is an active developer community creating complex sophisticated class definitions. All handled by one plugin. I could get it to work the other way using all the acronyms under the sun-but then i cope with all the browser issues. SVG is really cute-get back to me when there are real authoring apps, the files are as small as swf files and i don't have to download a plugin from adobe or IBM anyway. You guys spend all your time worrying about it not being open-source-meanwhile companies who are winning contracts an doing real work with flash that is training people from the army to intel to the automotive industry. I think you should all realize that open source is not the deal-breaker-price and delivery is. Flash helps many companies do that.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Webmonger · 2004-03-24 12:22 · Score: 1

Okay, good to know that SVG supports font embedding.

I find the addition of forms to SVG troubling because we already have open standards for that. I haven't been convinced (yet) that there's a need for another one. The bigger the standard, the harder it is to be compliant, and the less people will try.

When I say embedded files, I mean arbitrary embedded files that have no direct connection to the document's appearance. These things do exist in PDF, but I don't see a need for them in SVG. Data URLs don't cut the mustard, though. They only go to 1024 characters at 3 characters per 2 bytes.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by smallpaul · 2004-03-24 14:10 · Score: 1

SVG Print is a page description language.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 14:19 · Score: 0

> Flash will continue to disappear into oblivion.

haha.. yeah.. and Microsoft is abandoning the web space.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Ignominious+Cow+Herd · 2004-03-24 15:19 · Score: 1

OK, no more mushrooms for you. Or get a better sound card. Clearly 'badger, badger, badger' here.

--
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Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 15:24 · Score: 0

i think you mean...
if (SVG == Flash) ...
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Jameth · 2004-03-24 16:10 · Score: 1

Flash is a relatively extensive language with a decent database connector and many features specifically designed to make animation easy to do (built-in variables for frame referencing and so-such).

SVG is not just a replacement, even with SMIL. Maybe when it has matured a bit more, adding some better features, but not yet.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by sirdude · 2004-03-24 16:31 · Score: 1

They are both similar formats. But SVG is a nightmare compared to Flash, if you are a developer. Comparing an SVG document to swf source code is like comparing Word generated XML to notepad XML :S

I believe that SVG doesn't have sound support as yet.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by WorldMage · 2004-03-24 23:04 · Score: 1

I assume you mean 'xforms' when you say we already have an open standard? The issue with xforms is that it doesn't do anything to allow authors to control the appearence of the form elements.

In HTML this it generally fine but for many SVG use cases it is really important that people be able to control the forms elements in ways that xforms just doesn't allow.

Finally I don't think that this technology should be considered an alternative to xforms but another way of implementing xforms. Imagine if it was easy for a 3rd party to add xforms support to xhtml - lots of people would do it - right now you need to provide the entire xhtml renderer if you want to do xforms.

As far as the 1024 character limit is concerned SVG UA's go _way_ beyond this - it is quite common to have fairly large images (couple hundred K), FYI with base64 encoding it's 3 bytes per 4 chars. You get almost all of this loss back if you gzip the SVG file (which UA's are required to support).

--
The only difference between theory and practice is that in theory there isn't any.
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-25 04:17 · Score: 0

oh yeah, like we would all install a 2mb viewer (i.e. adobe's bloatware), that absolutely consumes my pc's resources, for a crappy result. and all this for the sake of open-source.

btw, for all those that aren't flash-freaked, check out http://www.kinesissoftware.com/. a java solution that produces swf from a xml source (and back).
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Bustback · 2004-03-25 08:56 · Score: 1

Flash = parent
SVG = child

Flash is a integrated development environment for many different uses.

SVG is a format specification. In other words, Flash would publish SVG. ... if anything.

I don't see how the comparison exists between the two. Possibly take the argument to the next level and make it "I'm wondering when SVG will be come SWF," or more accurately stated "Will SVG ever approach SWF in terms of penetration and abilities?"

The answer to both is most likely a resounding "who knows."

The personality type that would like to develop animation, make vector objects 'sing' and find new and exciting ways of presenting information don't typically like to have their creativity stifled by limitations. SVG is a limiting technology mainly because there is no decent IDE to develop with.

SWF is a very nice format because the main IDE is Flash, Flash MX or Flash MX 2004 - the best vector animation tool ever created. It's like Adobe Illustrator on steroids, with an added bonus of having a scripting language based on an already-established standard.

Somehow I feel as though, because you are working on platforms that are only free, you are:

1) Ignoring probably 90+ percent of the front-end development world for web and RIAs.

2) Making a judgement that because they are 'unfree' they are not valuable. Tell that to the legions of designers and art directors that thrive on Photoshop - and then tell me if you can do the same work with NIH Image.

3) Assuming that because Flash is a plug-in that it'll support whatever platform you are on. Looking at the Flash Player penetration stats would reveal that you exist in the 2 percent of the world that can't support an extremely common plug-in.

#terminal dump [user error]

peace.

Jon
Re:if (SVG = Flash) .... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-27 13:03 · Score: 0

There are of course efforts to use SVG with the Flash Player as the rendering engine (a sort of solution for now until SVG rendering browsers become ubiquitous)....

e.g. Thoth (client side):

http://www.absconditus.com/index.html?page=thoth

or Kinetic Fusion (server side):

http://www.kinesissoftware.com

I think he meant nose dirt or boogie by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:19 · Score: -1, Offtopic

pretty disgusting guy that Schaller fellow

Scalable graphics fill a niche by Sexual+Ass+Gerbil · 2004-03-24 05:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:Scalable graphics fill a niche by jfengel · 2004-03-24 05:46 · Score: 1

I'm really, really hoping Mapquest will start sending out maps in SVG format. Being able to put on all the street names (when you print it on a 300DPI printer instead of a 75DPI screen) will make it a lot easier to find places than the dead reckoning system you currently have to use. The location maps are nearly useless.

More installs by mystery_bowler · 2004-03-24 05:21 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Two years ago a friend of mine in New Orleans converted his employer to an all Linux/GNOME office running Open Office. The particular distro was Debian I think. It is about 40 users on a small network and they host their own website with BSD/Apache/PHP.

A year ago another friend in Mobile, Alabama converted his office of 10 users to Linux/KDE. Again, running Open Office. Small network, just a file server running Linux as well. The distro was Redhat.

I keep hearing tales of conversions all the time, each with (mostly) good results. The Gulf Coast isn't exactly a high-tech area, so I can only imagine that Linux desktops are being adopted (at least in the corporate world) at a better pace than I originally believed. Anyone from more...er..."modern" areas care to back that up or refute it?

--

My sigs always suck.

SVG is the best thing ever! by scorp1us · 2004-03-24 05:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

--
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Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:35 · Score: 0

I use MIDI files and all, but... sometimes (that is, 99% of the time) I want an actual recording of a performance, ya know?

I hope you were joking. :)
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by Gilk180 · 2004-03-24 05:44 · Score: 2, Informative

This is a decent comparison, except that it leaves out a very important fact. Most sounds are not generated through a midi-type process. On the other hand many images are produced by drawing vectors.

MIDI cannot rival the quality of sampled sound unless the sound being sampled was produced by a MIDI-like process.

SVG is good for many image applications because the sampled forms are produced through an SVG-like process.
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by gregoryb · 2004-03-24 05:45 · Score: 1

That's a good analogy, but does it extend to the type and quality of the images you can produce? Personally, I don't listen to MIDI songs because a recording (WAV) is much more versatile and a better representation of the recorded music.

So, with SVG, is it useful for images more complex than just line art or cell shaded drawings? Images more realistic? (Like photo-realistic drawings?) Line art and cell shading definately has a huge application, especially on the desktop, but if SVG is only good for line art and related style images, I can see the application being limited.

Try telling some of the kids in the design building across from me that they have to use only line art and cell shading from now on... (then run...) :)
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:52 · Score: 0

You're a tad off in you're comparissons. In both cases, svg vs raster and wav vs midi, midi and svg will always hold less information when the resolutions are the same or less. In the case of midi, resolution isn't even an issue, and most songs when reproduced exactly with midi (or equivilient) will create a midi file bigger than the wav output its generating. Same with SVG, sure it can be blown up without pixelization, but the inital image must have a limit to its complexity where the raster image would be limitless.
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by shiftless · 2004-03-24 06:07 · Score: 1

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.

Are you kidding? You would never, ever be able to approach the quality of/mimic a standard PCM-encoded CD.
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by FroMan · 2004-03-24 06:31 · Score: 1

Hmmm, use the right tool for the job.

Photographs do not make very good SVG, in the same way that a live concert recording does not make a MIDI.

Remember a couple days ago when we had the games article on how the Doom screenshots seemed too sterile? We get the same thing here. You could easily make a mock up in SVG of a city block, but it is not going to contain the dirt on the ground, oil stains in the street, leaves and newpaper blown into the alley.

--
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by scorp1us · 2004-03-24 06:31 · Score: 1

Let me clarify some things. I'm trying to compare it to MIDI, though most of you are taking it too literally.

Music notes have a pitch and duration. Instruments have 'tombre' which is the squigglies on a regular wave form that make a violin sound like a violin and a piano sounds like a piano.

If you could encode the tombre, then it is a small mathmatical transform away from any pitch.

Then it is only a matter of assembling "tombre" files (aka voices) Then specifying their use.

Traditional MIDI was designed 20 years ago, for the computing power back then, as a result everythign soudns 8 bit and like a Nintendo game.

Today the computers can brease through the calucations needed to render sounds on the fly. You can specify a voice and have it 'use' it (a la SVG command 'use') transform it with everythign from a pitch variation to added synth distortion. the facilites and power exists to get Spear's "Toxic" song down pat with everythign but her voice.

The human voice is the last thing needed. You could record it and overlay it, but you wouldn't save much. Instead we need to devise some archive of sounds, how they transition from sound to sound and some sort of descriptor to describe how the speach is comingout of the person (like Mad, Happy, etc). That "mood" is the most complicated part. But once solved, you have all you need to render music 99% accurately but in only a few k per song.

Example
<voice name="trent" file="trez.voc"> <instrument name="piano1" file="piano.tombre"> <song name="closer" bpm= time="2/4"> <measure> <lyric vioce="trent" words="I want to"/> <note instrument="pianp1" note="g" length="1/4" intensity=".8"/> <notes/> ... <notes/> <measur e> </song>
Then zip the whole thing.

Even if you have to overlay a raw voice or two, the codec could be heavily optimized for human voice because we can only be at once place in the scale at a time.

--
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by paulbd · 2004-03-24 07:17 · Score: 1

No, if you want an analogy in the audio domain, SVG is closer to MPEG4-SA (Structured Audio). It contains both instructions on how to make the sounds, and on when to make them. SAOL is the most well-formed implementation of MPEG4-SA so far.
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by DrSkwid · 2004-03-24 07:56 · Score: 1

I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.

you mean computers *are* the same already !

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by torpor · 2004-03-24 10:25 · Score: 1

a recording (WAV) is much more versatile

just to be pedantic, i take issue with this point. MIDI is actually more versatile than .WAV files. why do i say this? 'versatile' means "ability to do multiple different things". .WAV files can be slowed down, chopped up, sped up, or played normally. Or, you can apply some filter process to them, but if you want to automate that process, you're -adding- another data format to the mix.

MIDI is a control protocol. with MIDI, you can address very specific individual parameters of the sound you are hearing, if you're talking to a device that has a control protocol implementation...

its a pedantic point, but i think 'versatile' is more applicable to MIDI in terms of 'flexibility' than .WAV files ...

--
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by kisielk · 2004-03-24 14:19 · Score: 1

I'm sorry, but obviously you don't know the first thing about MIDI. MIDI has absolutely 0 to do with actually generating any sounds. It's essentially a proctocol (Music Instrument Digital INTERFACE) for sending instructions to devices to various devices. The sounds generated are wholly dependant on the device being controlled, and in fact many MIDI controlled devices have nothing to do with even generating sounds (you can control mixers, etc with MIDI). If "everything sounds 8 bit like a nintendo game" it just means the synthesizer you are using is of low quality. You can load a sampler with a 3GB set of piano samples and it would be nearly impossible for your average listener to distinguish the result from a recorded $100k piano.
Re:SVG is the best thing ever! by dublin · 2004-03-25 04:10 · Score: 1

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.

You're assuming it *will* take off. Don't get me wrong, I sincerely and fervently hope it does (it would make my life a LOT easier), but until and unless Microsoft puts support for SVG into IE, that *cannot* happen. (I rate Microsoft supporting SVG as just slightly less likely than John Kerry taking a consistent and unchanging stand on any given issue and marrying a woman who's not an heiress...)

Seriously, this is an area where Microsoft's monopoly *really* matters - with over 90% of the world's web surfers using IE, SVG is just flat irrelevant if Microsoft doesn't support it. Since it conflicts and competes with their own strategy and goals, I don't expect to see SVG support from Microsoft anytime soon. Even if they were to decide to support it, that wouldn't be until at least the "Longhorn timeframe" (in MS-speak), which is now likely 2006 or beyond...

--
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last ./ post

Vector graphics on the dekstop by pacsman · 2004-03-24 05:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:Vector graphics on the dekstop by DeadSea · 2004-03-24 06:21 · Score: 2, Informative

The nice thing about the start menu is that it is always on top (at least for me). I don't think I've seen my desktop in years. A better start menu would be awesome, but making me go to the desktop would be an archeology project.
Re:Vector graphics on the dekstop by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-03-24 06:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

``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.''

You have a very interesting point there. I think having one menu with all programs in it is a Good Thing, but I strongly believe GNOME and KDE have it because Windows has it. I guess the idea is to make the system accessible to switchers by cloning the behavior, but I do not see that as the right approach. I believe in making a better system for those who choose to use it.

I don't care how many people use an open source OS and whether or not Fred Foobar would switch if we do or don't have the same buttons on our windows in the same places. If you do care about market share, you should realize that you can't beat MicroSoft by cloning them - they will always stay ahead of you. Even if you have higher quality and stability and useful features, people are going to complain that the VBScript in some webpage doesn't work or they can't open their Excel database; you just can't convert them all.

Meanwhile, I think we should innovate. Let's take advantage of Reiser4 and develop a set of utilities to make the most of extended attributes. Let's work on ZeroConf and IPv6, making our systems ready for painless networking. Let's integrate the shell and the programming language, so we can use functions from shared libraries in the shell and have sudo-like access control for function calls (no more running the whole program as r00t because it needs to do one priviliged thing). Or anything else you come up with.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:Vector graphics on the dekstop by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:59 · Score: 2, Interesting

If you do care about market share, you should realize that you can't beat MicroSoft by cloning them - they will always stay ahead of you.

Sure as hell you can beat Microsoft by cloning their interface. People aren't leaving Windows because KDE or Gnome are so pretty [IMHO, they have gone from a depressing barebone ugliness to a godawful all-colorful all-curvy kindergarten look, but that's just me] but because the computer becomes more stable, they feel they have control over the system, security improves, and -- most importantly -- it's cheaper.

The desktop needs to be just good enough, not any fancier than Windows, and Microsoft will see shrinking profits. (Eventually, no they won't disappear, they'll start selling a Linux distro with "MS added value", yeah special built-in apps with patented technology and proprietary file formats.)
Re:Vector graphics on the dekstop by abe+ferlman · 2004-03-24 07:22 · Score: 1

That's one benefit of using windows- you're forced to reboot before too much clutter can accumulate :)

--
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Re:Vector graphics on the dekstop by cubic6 · 2004-03-24 08:04 · Score: 1

Meanwhile, I think we should innovate. Let's take advantage of Reiser4 and develop a set of utilities to make the most of extended attributes. Let's work on ZeroConf and IPv6, making our systems ready for painless networking. Let's integrate the shell and the programming language, so we can use functions from shared libraries in the shell and have sudo-like access control for function calls (no more running the whole program as r00t because it needs to do one priviliged thing). Or anything else you come up with.
You've got some really great ideas. If you need a moderately-skilled college programmer to help implement them, give me a call ;)

--
Karma: Contrapositive
Re:Vector graphics on the dekstop by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-03-24 08:11 · Score: 1

``You've got some really great ideas. If you need a moderately-skilled college programmer to help implement them, give me a call ;)''

Thanks for the compliment. If you are serious about helping me implement some of these, please use the mail form on my website (http://www.inglorion.net/mail.php). I'm not offering you money, though, at least not for now.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:Vector graphics on the dekstop by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-03-24 08:57 · Score: 2, Interesting

``Sure as hell you can beat Microsoft by cloning their interface. People aren't leaving Windows because KDE or Gnome are so pretty [IMHO, they have gone from a depressing barebone ugliness to a godawful all-colorful all-curvy kindergarten look, but that's just me] but because the computer becomes more stable, they feel they have control over the system, security improves, and -- most importantly -- it's cheaper.''

That's exactly what I meant: people switch from Windows not because they want a partial implementation of what Windows has, but because they want what Windows _doesn't_ give them.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.

No offense by superpulpsicle · 2004-03-24 05:23 · Score: -1, Flamebait

But this sounds like another project wearing the name "linux" thin?

You're trolling, but I'll bite by kenneth_martens · 2004-03-24 05:24 · Score: 4, Informative

GNU/Linux desktop??? Isn't KDE the desktop, and GNU/Linux the kernel?

Not exactly. Linux is the kernel, X Windows is the GUI, and KDE (or GNOME) is the Desktop Environment. The whole package together is called GNU/Linux, but most people just call it Linux. I sidestep the whole GNU/Linux vs. Linux debate by just calling it Mandrake or Debian or Redhat, but that's just me.

So, in summary:

Linux -> the kernel
X Windows -> the GUI
KDE or GNOME -> the desktop environment
GNU/Linux, or just "Linux" -> the whole package
Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, etc -> specific version of GNU/Linux

Re:You're trolling, but I'll bite by Hektor_Troy · 2004-03-24 05:46 · Score: 0, Informative

Just to nitpick a bit, I don't think it would be fair to call "the whole package" GNU/Linux. AFIK GNU/Linux IS the Kernel.

The whole package (as I read your post) would quite likely include various programs, that aren't GNU-programs.

--
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Re:You're trolling, but I'll bite by lpangelrob2 · 2004-03-24 05:50 · Score: 1

It's not necessarily a troll if people legitimately don't know what all of that is. Know what my first *nix-based system was? Mac OS X. There's a reason for that.
Most of the rest of the computing world... and I'd say, oh, probably up to a quarter of the people reading Slashdot, although I don't have a poll (ridiculous as the end figures would be)... wouldn't have been able to relate to me the information you just stated. It's not that I'm ignorant, nor that I lack a basic knowledge of computers, I just work, and was raised on, Windows. (Of course, now I work on Macs. :-p)
The most I've learned was when I *tried* to install Gentoo. It didn't work, but I learned quite a bit, and even then that's just scratching the surface, and despite the many hours I spent doing that, I probably still don't know very much.
For most people, that makes [insert distro here] a bit too scared to try it. Present what needs to be known, in a nice format that non-techies can understand, and make everything that's unknown about Linux known. Yeah, maybe end-user Joe will forget after a while, but at least he's appeased.
Anyways, back to my Slackware box and figuring out how I should really start KDE... or X, as it should be called now. :-p No, I haven't used Linux as a desktop ever, so no, it's not obvious.

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-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Re:You're trolling, but I'll bite by MythMoth · 2004-03-24 05:55 · Score: 4, Informative

Just to unpick that specific nit, the kernel as a whole is the specific thing that even the FSF would agree is not GNU/Linux:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux

--
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Re:You're trolling, but I'll bite by Eslyjah · 2004-03-24 06:02 · Score: 3, Informative

I think GNU usually refers to the userspace (but still fairly low level) tools, like ls, cd, pwd, top, etc.
Re:You're trolling, but I'll bite by mst76 · 2004-03-24 06:20 · Score: 3, Informative

> X Windows -> the GUI
> KDE or GNOME -> the desktop environment

There's no such thing as X Windows, it's either X, X11 or the X Window System. And although most implementations ship with a primitive UI (twm and some Xlib apps), nobody actually uses this as their UI. These days, an X implementation like XFree86 is mostly used as hardware driver and low level drawing engine for toolkit writers. The actual UI is a DE like KDE, Gnome, or a WM like blackbox, Windowmaker.
Re:You're trolling, but I'll bite by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 07:36 · Score: 0

As opposed to:

Windows -> EVERYTHING.

and you wonder why microsoft's winning?

.
Re:You're trolling, but I'll bite by srussell · 2004-03-24 13:29 · Score: 1

... and to follow RMS's lead, I insist that it be called GNU/Linux/XFree86/KDE/Mandrake, not just "Linux".

Metadata by Simarilius · 2004-03-24 05:24 · Score: 1

SVG allows you to embed a lot more than just the graphics related info, like you said it can be any text or text encoding, so you can put fonts, bitmap thumbnails, info on what the file is (think keywords for search systems) author info, licensing info, whatever takes your fancy.

wave of the future by minus_273 · 2004-03-24 05:27 · Score: 1

i tell you the wave of the future is XML image formats.. nothing gets compression like XML.. umm ...nm

--
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace

Re:wave of the future by orangenormal · 2004-03-24 05:50 · Score: 3, Informative

But XML can be compressed using some amazingly efficient text compression algorithms. In fact, XML generally compresses better than regular text because it has so many predictable features. An SVG file compressed using standard ZIP format yeilds impressive results. It's highly likely most SVG files will be distributed this way.
Re:wave of the future by Minna+Kirai · 2004-03-24 06:25 · Score: 2, Insightful

It's true that SVG (and XML in general) compresses well using normal Lempel-Ziv techniques.

But that only solves part of the problem, and isn't enough to make XML efficient for an integral part of interactive computer systems (where speed is crucial).

Normal XML is already slower than a binary format, because you must parse through the whole thing to reach the middle (linear time) versus jumping to an offset in the file (constant time). Adding compression to the mix makes that even worse, as now you've got to do the whole unpacking before the data can be read.

So although ZIP mostly solves the XML storage-size problem, it worsens the already bad XML access-time issue.

It's truely unfortunate that the XML standard didn't include some recommended/authoritative way to transform an XML file into a platform-dependent binary. Or even a defined mapping from XML into an XDR-like layout would be useful.
Re:wave of the future by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:51 · Score: 0

Mod up the above poster, they are 100% correct and insightful. Although I think she ( he? ) meant "platform INDEPENDANT binary form"
Re:wave of the future by MenTaLguY · 2004-03-24 07:14 · Score: 2, Informative

That isn't really true -- the binary format does save you some parsing work, but that's about it.

Traversing down into the tree is still going to be logarithmic time, at best -- in most real applications you will have to visit the parent nodes to get relevent context information. Unless you've got an index of each node's children in there, you'll still have to resort to some linear scanning...

That's assuming you work directly with the data in serialized form, though, which is not generally a realistic assumption.

Any application using XML data interactively is going to parse the file _once_, into an AST, and use that instead of parsing/writing text over and over. As a result, the application's performance will be dominated by the performance characteristics of the AST representation, not the deserialization costs of the original data.

Binary formats make more sense for e.g. streaming situations, since there you're spending the majority of your time serializing/deserializing data rather than doing transformations on it (i.e. constructing an AST in those cases would be a waste of effort).

--

DNA just wants to be free...
Re:wave of the future by MenTaLguY · 2004-03-24 07:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

...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...
Re:wave of the future by jilles · 2004-03-24 08:45 · Score: 2, Informative

In addition you could use ebxml, which is xml in a binary form. This is currently mostly used in wap2.0 and soap. But there's no reason to not use it elsewhere.

The human readable part of xml is a myth. It is just structured data. The most common way to represent this data happens to be very verbose unicode formatted text. Ebxml can be seen as a binary equivalent representation of this data. Instead of the verbose tags and the tedious brackets, whitespace, comments, etc a few bits are used as symbols for tags and attributenames so it is just textual data decorated with binary symbols. Ebxml can be parsed very efficiently (after all xml is nothing but a simple tree representation) and in case of automated generation/consumption, you don't have to worry so much about well formedness (of course you can validate if you want), assuming the generator puts the bits in the right order.

IMHO it is ideal for situations where one program dumps xml to a stream that is read by another program, for example XHTML generated from a contentmanagement system and consumed by a browser. Or embedded svg objects in a openoffice document. Or XML fragments stored in a database.

Currently lots of bandwidth and computer resources are wasted on the human readable part (just, for a second, consider how many bytes of totally pointless commented xml/html fragments are transmitted on the average site, how many brackets, quotes and verbose tagnames the average webpage contains).

But most XML is never touched by a human editor. There is no technical reason for storing XML as very verbose text other than that this is easier to read, debug and generate from scripts. If you construct xml using an api rather than output text to some stream (which in the long term will save you from some headaches), ebxml makes no difference at all.

Ebxml, in combination with gzip compression, would be hard to beat for equivalent datastreams (with the same information). You get very compact data that is easy to parse back into a dom datastructure without giving up the advantage of being able to approach the data using the standard apis (including being able to dump regular unicode xml if needed).

--

Jilles
Re:wave of the future by MrBlue+VT · 2004-03-24 11:35 · Score: 1

Yeah, but if you have a giant file on disk, you'd rather not have to read the entire thing to find what you're looking for. Much easier to just jump directly into the middle of a large file to get a piece of data than read the whole file into memory and then extract the data.

The problem is that you never know exactly where in an XML file a certain bit of data is located.
Re:wave of the future by Permission+Denied · 2004-03-24 13:42 · Score: 1
Currently lots of bandwidth and computer resources are wasted on the human readable part (just, for a second, consider how many bytes of totally pointless commented xml/html fragments are transmitted on the average site, how many brackets, quotes and verbose tagnames the average webpage contains).
Sounds like a modest proposal for reducing Internet traffic.
Except ... DJB has more of a point (heh) since svg is usually gzipped as opposed to plain-text smtp (so bandwidth gains are nil). Even for the more general case of xml transferred of http, you have Transfer-Encoding: gzip.
Show me some numbers on how this encoding saves orders of time in parsing and I'll listen. If all it does is encode tags as sequences of bits, it's just performing a weak form of dictionary compression and doesn't help at all with the real issue of data extraction (indexing specific points in the file). However, I can't find any numbers, nor any information whatsoever about the ebxml you describe after five minutes on google (everything points to "electronic business using XML", even along with terms like "wap" and "soap"). So perhaps ebxml isn't the Next Big Thing.
I read through your post and you give absolutely zero reasons why ebxml would be better than regular text-based xml:
1. Instead of the verbose tags and the tedious brackets
  What a minute, you're reading the XML text yourself or generating XML text from a script? You shouldn't do that. You see, generating XML using standard APIs in the "long term will save you from some headaches."
2. Ebxml can be parsed very efficiently (after all xml is nothing but a simple tree representation)
  After all, text-based XML and ebxml are nothing but simple tree representations.
  If you think about what ebxml does (dictionary compression on tags from what you describe), you'll see it saves absolutely no time whatsoever in parsing but merely removes the task of lexing. Lexing (symbol recognition) takes no time at all.
3. If you construct xml using an api rather than output text to some stream (which in the long term will save you from some headaches), ebxml makes no difference at all.
  Except that it's more difficult to "to read, debug and generate from scripts".
If you really want to cut bandwidth, you will note that so much of what we send over the Internet is plain text; therefore, we can ensure that Dave and Virginia go to college if we simply adopt some simple spelling reforms to cut the redundancy of English.
Re:wave of the future by Minna+Kirai · 2004-03-24 14:33 · Score: 1

XDR is primarily used for situations where serialization/deserialization costs dominate

I've worked with XML datafiles that are 100s of megabytes, and even though the data is all local, it'd still be nice to have a binary representation so records towards the end can be reached without going through the whole thing first.

(If I assumed the XML was written by a trusted programs, I could make assumptions beyond what the standard specifies, and skip over parsing some sections I trust to be uninteresting. But that would violate the specification, and could break if someone replaced the file with another bit of valid XML)
Re:wave of the future by Minna+Kirai · 2004-03-24 15:19 · Score: 1
the binary format does save you some parsing work

For some files, parsing is 80% of the access time.

Traversing down into the tree is still going to be logarithmic time, at best

No, logarithmic is more like a worst case. Depending on the nature of the data, the time could be linear. Nobody said the information was actually tree-like. Many XML files, for example, are the equivalent of a flat-file database: one record per block, with no parent-child relationship amoung those records. That data could be accessed in linear time, if stored in a non-XML-like form.

However, if "all" it did was improve the performance to log time, that'd be wonderful. The rule of thumb for many purposes is that log time is just as good as constant time (which itself is nearly as good as zero-time). If I scan a page and trace it into an SVG file with 50000 line elements, the the mean access time via XML is 25000. But if performance were somehow logarithmic, the time would be just 15. (That's CS 102, "The value of logs")

That's assuming you work directly with the data in serialized form, though, which is not generally a realistic assumption.

No. You just used "serialized" to mean "as stored persistently", but that's not necessarily true. There are non-serial ways to store something that avoid the performance hits of (de)serialization.

Any application using XML data interactively is going to parse the file _once_, into an AST,

That reinforces my point that XML is an inefficient format.

You are prehaps arguing that the inefficiency doesn't matter, because the application can precompute a more efficient local representation. But there's several problems with that position.
1. Replication of programmer effort.
2. Increased startup time (precaching is non-free)
3. Most importantly, the assumption that the images contained in the SVG files are rarely changing is untrue. It (initially) holds true for the icons in your desktop theme, but not for much else (web pages, and streaming remote GUIs!!).
4. The closer the system comes to following the UNIX philosopy, the smaller individual "applications" will be. Therefore the cost of XML<->AST conversion (which is performed at each application boundary) grows larger the more componentized the system is.
It is, however, too late to amend the XML specification to address those concerns, so an optimizied local format is the best an application can do.
Re:wave of the future by Minna+Kirai · 2004-03-24 15:29 · Score: 1

But there's no reason to not use it elsewhere.

Except that EBXML is not a specification from a recognized standards-body. So it's worthless as a means to communicate between independently-written software.

Even if by a miracle EBXML gets standardized quickly, it'll be too late. XML is out there now, getting more entrenched everyday. If a system reports that it accepts input as SVG files, I won't be able to trust that it won't choke on an SVG stored in EBXML.

But most XML is never touched by a human editor. There is no technical reason for storing XML as very verbose text

Which is why binary-storage like EBXML should've always been part of the XML specification itself. But it wasn't, and now we can't rewrite history.
Re:wave of the future by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 20:04 · Score: 0

XML may compress better than something of the same original size while compressing worse than something of the same informational content in a format that was more compact to begin with.
Re:wave of the future by MenTaLguY · 2004-03-25 05:02 · Score: 1

This is true.

I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone whose relevent background here is mostly in monolithic SVG editor applications, and I guess my biases are showing.

It is, however, too late to amend the XML specification to address those concerns, so an optimizied local format is the best an application can do.

Agreed. And, also, I think the optimized local format needs a very different design from XML's.

My criticisms in the GP do apply to most of the "binary XML" proposals that have been made, because they do little more than replace string tokens with shorter bit sequences, retaining the bad random-access characteristics of XML.

I erroneously thought that was where you were coming from too, and also I obviously didn't think about the log time thing very carefully.

--

DNA just wants to be free...
Re:wave of the future by jilles · 2004-03-25 08:59 · Score: 1

I suggest you read my post again. This time think about it a bit longer and then counter your own arguments one by one. I could do it for you but I have better things to do.

--

Jilles
Re:wave of the future by jilles · 2004-03-25 09:08 · Score: 1

You have a point with the standards body though you might consider it an industry standard by now.

The idea of ebxml is so simple that it should be possible to create a similar standard. In any case, lossless transformations between xml and ebxml should not be that hard so it is not to late in that sense.

--

Jilles

Woo, Open Standards by tblease · 2004-03-24 05:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

With the way things are moving towards more of these open standards, it's too bad that people are still relying so heavily on propriatary (sp?) formats like those found in MS Office and some of the Adobe products.

I work at the Center for Teaching, Learning Technology at the university I am enrolled at. I am currently putting together a web-based document management system that is built around XML, and after seeing how much more powerful these open standards can be (especially, when you start looking at all the wonderful concepts that augment XML -- XSL, XPATH, XSL:FO, and the like).

We used to put together all of our documentation for workshops and whatnot using MS Word, and then later switched to InDesign for the sake of having more control over the layout. The new web-based system means we lost some control over the layout of these documents, but the amount of time we've saved and the flexibility we've gained from using it is worth more than its weight in gold (all 2mb worth -- if that, even)

What's frightening, however, is to see these products like MS Word and others potentially offering the option to export to a more open format, like XML. Ever tried reading through MS Word generated HTML? It's almost a fun task, and I hate to think of the possibilty of having to read through MS Word generated XML... eep!

--
huzzah

Re:Woo, Open Standards by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:48 · Score: 1, Insightful

Ever read through StarOffice XML? It's no treat either -- complex software creates big bloated XML.

Word HTML is full of crap so that you can "round trip" the documents DOC->HTML->DOC. They now have a plugin which generates plain HTML, but it's not super clean either.

Apparently the latest MS Office allows you to define your own XML schemas for use as part of an applicaiton workflow. However, I have no idea how useful this is, or if's just an extention of the forms/database bloat that's already in MS Office.
Re:Woo, Open Standards by Knight2K · 2004-03-24 06:08 · Score: 1

If you use DocBook XML, you might not necessarily have to give up much on the layout side either... and there is a pretty fair tool chain for using DocBook documents.

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In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
Re:Woo, Open Standards by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 08:09 · Score: 0

Well, don't put too much faith in XML to remain unencumbered by IP. ebXML has patents wrapped up in it (IBM, MS), not in the description, but on the use of an XML DTD as an interchange method for the purpose that ebXML was made.

MS could very well easily fully document and release its various MSXMLDOC DTDs, adding similar patent encumbrances that keep people from implementing them w/o paying MS a license fee...

Sweet... Tempest and Qix on my desktop... by hoggoth · 2004-03-24 05:29 · Score: 1

This is great. I will be able to play Tempest and Qix in my workstation desktop background.
Nice work!

Umm... and I can... um...
I can play asteroids! Yeah! That's great too!

--
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)

Need SVG help? by Phrogz · 2004-03-24 05:29 · Score: 4, Informative

If *you* need SVG support (with creating it) now that your desktop supports it, I highly recommend the fine folks in #svg on the Freenode IRC network.

Re:Need SVG help? by wombatmobile · 2004-03-24 08:43 · Score: 1

This forum is free and active with experts: svg-developers

wtf... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:30 · Score: -1, Offtopic

does this tripe have to do with svg? i don't give a rat's fuzzy ass if your brother's best friends gay lover got his fat retarted boss to install linux on a computer. jesus christmas!

Good comparison by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:31 · Score: 0

That's actually a very good comparison

Except that we have compressed formats for images.

So it's closer to comparing MIDI to MP3. And let us be frank - Midi has lost that battle.

Then again, you view an image at half size much much more often than you want to listen to audio at half tempo - so maybe it will win there.

But unless we get much faster processing of vector graphics, then you are going to end up caching the rendered bitmaps anyway - and then you don't really have any reason not to source from bitmaps in the first place.

Having a desktop where everything can zoom and rotate and deform freely is an interesting idea - but in practice you'll end up choosing a few effects and sticking to them. So SVG for experimentation, then convert to bitmaps for real use?

SVG looks fun by gnuzip · 2004-03-24 05:32 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Re:SVG looks fun by Rahga · 2004-03-24 06:00 · Score: 3, Interesting

SVG does what you want, and XML makes it managable...

Full disclosure, I did a SVG tileset for GNOME Mahjongg... To make a rectangle that fits your description, just add <rect x="0" y="0" width="50" height="50" fill="#0000FF" stroke-width="5"> ... Too bloated? Try a path: I think <path fill="#0000FF" strike-width="5" d="M0 0H50V50H0Z"> would work...

As far as XML goes, I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful xmllint is in what I do with SVG, how nice it is to be able to automate the creation of certain SVGs with perl scripts, and the aid provided by typical tools such as sed. Most of us have not yet even started to exploit CSS. Anyway, doing the same in a non-xml format, to me, would be a nightmare.
Re:SVG looks fun by Rahga · 2004-03-24 06:07 · Score: 1

I should have also mentioned that all of the fill and stroke specifications could be easily avoided with CSS and simply specifying a style for that path instead.
Re:SVG looks fun by bug-eyed+monster · 2004-03-24 06:30 · Score: 1

The good thing about XML for SVG: most modern programs already have support for parsing, manipulating and writing XML (through DOM, etc). So when it comes time to add support for SVG, the authors don't need to implement support for yet another set of file syntax. All they need to do is implement a bridge between XML elements and the rendering routines they already have.

In short, political issues aside, XML should make adoption of SVG much more easier.
Re:SVG looks fun by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 18:10 · Score: 0

Unfortunately SVG isn't a simple format. It won't do any good for you to pass it through a XML library, you need an SVG library to parse through all the myriad possible functionalities anyhow. As far as I can see, the main advantage of making the actual storage format XML is the buzzword factor, which has made companies adopt the format.

Decency on TV by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:32 · Score: -1, Offtopic

What the hell is going on?

Now you can't show a tit, swear or even show your middle finger on TV? What the hell is going on?

Re:Decency on TV by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 10:12 · Score: 0

One word: Rampant faggotry.

Other implementation by sczimme · 2004-03-24 05:32 · Score: 2, Funny

Around 1994 or so I had an updated version of this working. It was a major revision, so it was called SVGA.

:-)

/yes, it's a joke

--
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.

I'll bite. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:35 · Score: 0

I thought GNU/Linux was the kernel?

No, the kernel is called Linux. GNU/Linux is a pedantic name for the base system (kernel, libraries, and select programs). The things you should be concerned about have names like Mandrake Linux, Fedora Core, etc.

The ?n*x world is confusing

You have your globs reversed. Save yourself the trouble and just call it Unix.

Isn't KDE the desktop

KDE is a desktop. GNOME is another, and XFCE, GNUstep, and XPde are others.

THINK ABOUT YOUR INDEMNIFICATION! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:39 · Score: -1, Troll

Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR INDEMNIFICATION

Yes that's right, THINK ABOUT YOUR INDEMNIFICATION. Why you might ask? Well it's simple!

Your brain usually takes care of breathing FOR you, but whenever you remember this, YOU MUST LIBERALLY TOUCH YOUR JUNK! If you don't you will DIE.

There are also MANY variations of this. For example, think about:

TROLLING!

FIRST POSTING!

HAVING SEX WITH A FEMALE ZEBRA IN HEAT!

In conclusion, the THINK ABOUT YOUR INDEMNIFICATION troll is simply unbeatable.
These 4 words can be thrown randomly into article text trolls, into sigs, into anything, and once seen, WILL FORCE THE VICTIM TO TAKE CARE OF HIS JUNK MANUALLY! This goes far beyond the simple annoying or insulting trolls of yesteryear.

In fact, by EVEN RESPONDING to this troll, you are proving that IT HAS CLAIMED ANOTHER VICTIM -- YOU!

Great, now we just need an affordable app for it by British · 2004-03-24 05:39 · Score: 1

So far, the best SVG authoring app is Xstudio6. It has easy to use dialogs for just about every single aspect for the SVG 1.1(I think) spec.

Downside is it costs ~$400. A bit pricey for me to goof off with. Thankfully there's
Inkscape/sodipodi, but there's no animation support. It's mainly for static images.

SVG is quite powerful and I can't wait until the day someone goes overboard and makes a FPS out of it(which would be an interesting test of Adobe's SVG plugin). C'mon widespread adoption go go go.

Best viewed on a vector display by Bram+Stolk · 2004-03-24 05:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

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/

Re:Best viewed on a vector display by Minna+Kirai · 2004-03-24 06:29 · Score: 4, Informative

where could you get a modern vector display nowadays

A few posts have commented that vector-displays would be good to use with SVG-based desktops. They're probably all joking, because there is no such thing as a modern vector-graphics display, and if it did exist, it would be inapplicable.

Vector displays can only draw the actual vectors, which are just straight lines. Vector graphics consist of more than just vectors, and actually includes a full set of primitives whose positions are merely defined by vectors.

Even a simple filled triangle (surely one of the most common elements of existing SVG files) is beyond the capability of a vector display, unless it emulated a raster display to draw the shape as a series of scanlines.
Re:Best viewed on a vector display by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 11:47 · Score: 0

I don't know how quantum did it, but it was capable of drawing solid objects. However, I'm sure it would be very hard to impliment large solid on a screen (scanning way too many electron beams around at once)
Re:Best viewed on a vector display by MrBlue+VT · 2004-03-24 11:50 · Score: 1

Screw raster displays, I want a ray tracing display!

See this and this.

Pretty amazing considering current graphics cards are pretty much just optimized for rasterizing triangles really frigging fast. The new pixel/fragment shaders are really very cool.

Yes! Finally. Let's create an SVG desktop... by theendlessnow · 2004-03-24 05:43 · Score: 5, Funny

... so I can finally use my 8 way Opteron with 16GB to its fullest potential!!

SVG is the best thing ever!-Wonderworks. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:46 · Score: 0

"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."

Oh whatever will photographers do. SVG isn't a replacement for bitmaps, they both have their place, and as I pointed out elsewere you can embed an image into SVG.

"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."

The tracking scene isn't dead.

"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.""

Within limits. Fonts are vector-based and they need hinting to bring out their best.

"I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off."

The problem is that no one (open or closed) has a complete implimentation. What good is a standard that you can't use?

Re:SVG is the best thing ever!-Wonderworks. by scorp1us · 2004-03-24 05:56 · Score: 1

Adobe SVG plug in Beta 6 is the best out there (and works with IE and Firebird), KSVG is also very close. Mozilla is the worst: not in default branch (yet) and Adobe would have to write a lot of binding code for the in-document JS to work for Moz.

--
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.

Cairo by po8 · 2004-03-24 05:47 · Score: 3, Informative

What makes SVG even cooler is that we have the perfect rendering technology for it: Cairo. Cairo renders perfectly stroked and antialiased SVG for a variety of backends including bitmaps, PostScript, and X11.

Hopefully the SVG projects will either adopt the existing Cairo SVG code or use the Cairo rendering code as a backend for their SVG libraries.

Vocals, music royalties, and photos by tepples · 2004-03-24 05:48 · Score: 1

I foresee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.

Except residential casual copyright infringers no longer trade MIDI or MOD files anymore. Most now trade .mp3 (MPEG audio) or .ogg (Ogg Vorbis audio) files on P2P networks.

Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters.

By "human voice parameters" do you mean a recording of Britney's actual voice compressed with Speex or some other wideband CELP codec? Otherwise, "human voice parameters" will never sound exactly like Britney Spears. And since when has the quality of real-time digital synthesis improved to such that substituting MIDI for the recorded performance of a full orchestra to satisfy an audiophile?

Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.

"Ignoring the vocals" means ignoring the vast majority of the music played on commercial FM radio today. Besides, "thousands of songs on a CD" would make CDs more expensive, as the label would have to pay extra royalties to the songwriters(' publishers). Sure, Mutopia would be able to pack a sound font and a thousand .ly.gz files onto an affordable CD, but Mutopia is an isolated case.

SVG also fixes the pixelation issue

The future of digital imaging among residential users lies in photos and video. Digital cameras output photos made of pixels. What the heck kind of autotrace are you imagining for resizing a photo? Manual trace takes work; a typical residential user just wants to blow up a photo and print it or blow up video to fit on a 32" TV.

Re:Vocals, music royalties, and photos by Profane+MuthaFucka · 2004-03-24 06:05 · Score: 0

By "human voice parameters" do you mean a recording of Britney's actual voice

I thought about it a second, and I realized that in theory this is possible, but it would be really REALLY hard to do. In essence, we'd need to scan a performers voice system, including their lungs, diaphram, throat, mouth, teeth, etc. That system forms a physical system than can theoretically be modelled. So, when the 'voice midi' code says to make a sound, it would actually be something like a specification for the diaphram force, mouth position, tension on all the muscles in the vocal cords, and so on. The physical system would be completely simulated, and the sound reproduced on the speakers.

Somehow, I doubt that this would save a lot of space. It might turn out that simply recording the pattern of air compression waves (sound) is a really good way of abstracting the details of the simulation.

--
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!

Music notation and SVG? by ratfynk · 2004-03-24 05:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

Given an interface that uses advanced graphics. A really skookum java based music notation interface might be addressed as graphical elements. One of the most annoying aspects of current music notation software is the reliance on fonts and the lack of printer friendly vector drawing interfaces. MusicXML from Recordaire.com is a start, but alot more can be done.

--
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by scorp1us · 2004-03-24 05:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) (Code) by scorp1us · 2004-03-24 05:52 · Score: 3, Funny

Example (as SVG):

<voice name="violin" source="violin.wav|mp3" as="g"> <song name="space notes scale"/> <use name="violin" shiftto="f"/> <use name="violin" shiftto="a"/> <use name="violin" shiftto="c"/> <use name="violin" shiftto="e"/> </song>

--
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.

Finally, I can resurrect my vector monitor! by 192939495969798999 · 2004-03-24 05:54 · Score: 2, Funny

Anyone remember vector monitors? Those things would be great to resurrect, supposing that SVG really kicks in on the desktop, and also supposing that we get some svg version of asteroids shipping with those new o/s installs... nice!

--
stuff |

Re:Finally, I can resurrect my vector monitor! by Dogtanian · 2004-03-24 07:38 · Score: 1

supposing that we get some svg version of asteroids shipping with those new o/s installs... nice!

No. Asteroids is great, but Atari/Infogrames will sue the ass off anyone who puts out an authentic copy, and very few not-quite-Asteroids clones do anything except look third-rate and suck.

--
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).

Here we go again! by fiannaFailMan · 2004-03-24 05:55 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yeah yeah yeah "Flash sucks, blah blah blah."

Dude, the web is full of badly designed websites written in HTML. Is HTML a bad standard?

Flash is capable of creating compact little applications, parsing XML from a data source, playing video, and doing a million other things that are made possible by the ubiquitous Flash player. We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.' I wish the /. community would update their knowledge accordingly.

Sheesh!

--
Drill baby drill - on Mars

Re:Here we go again! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:02 · Score: 0

This biggest problem with flash is that it is not open and thus it runs exactly opposite of the entire concept behind the internet. Which is interconnection. A secret sauce solution like flash has no place (or shouldn't if free sharing of ideas and open interaction between platforms is the goal) on the internet unless they open it and allow it to become some sort of standard besides the ever popular "defacto*" standard (*read monopoly)
Re:Here we go again! by TwistedSquare · 2004-03-24 06:35 · Score: 1

Is HTML a bad standard?
No, but is Flash actually a standard? Erm... no. It's propietary. I personally always click intro still and generally once I've installed mozilla I never bother getting the Flash plugin because Flash has yet to enhance a website rather than just getting in the way of using it in my opinion.
Re:Here we go again! by jpkunst · 2004-03-24 06:40 · Score: 1

We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.'

Unfortunately, we moved into the days of 'huge annoying animated advertisement that cannot be skipped' (unless by disabling the Flash plugin). Not really an improvement in my opinion.

JP
Re:Here we go again! by TheTomcat · 2004-03-24 06:46 · Score: 2, Informative

No, but is Flash actually a standard? Erm... no. It's propietary.

FUD.

The flash format has been documented and thus "open" since 1998.

S
Re:Here we go again! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 07:16 · Score: 0

Did it really cause any fear, uncertainty or doubt? I didn't think so. Quit throwing around the F word like that... we reserve that for Microsoft and SCO here.
Re:Here we go again! by timeOday · 2004-03-24 07:30 · Score: 1

We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.'
...and into the era of
rm -f libflashplayer.so
Re:Here we go again! by DrSkwid · 2004-03-24 07:53 · Score: 1

I wish the /. community would update their knowledge accordingly.

How do you expect me to keep up with file formats I can't use because they are only implemented on two platforms, both of which are unfree ?

Macromedia Flash Player Download Center

We are unable to locate a single Web player that best matches your platform and operating system.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:Here we go again! by johnnyb · 2004-03-24 08:49 · Score: 1

Documented != Open.

--
Engineering and the Ultimate
Re:Here we go again! by StarBar · 2004-03-24 09:24 · Score: 1

Well Flash sucks also because it is slow on low end machines, like a set top box. It uses a ray-trace algorithm that is performed for each frame produced, which is very CPU consuming. I hope that SVG animations will use a better technique than that.
Re:Here we go again! by zurab · 2004-03-24 10:12 · Score: 1

We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.'

Indeed we have moved on to the days of domain-specific plug-in permissions as implemented in recent Konqueror releases. We are no longer forced to download and watch extremely annoying flash ads, some even with very intrusive soundtracks. Not even to get started on how flash disables my default browser controls as I expect them to work anywhere else on the web - back/forward, open link in new window/tab, view image, select/copy/paste, find text, save link as, etc., etc., etc.
Re:Here we go again! by fiannaFailMan · 2004-03-24 10:48 · Score: 1

I hope you enable JavaScript while you're at it. Look at all those annoying popup windows! JavaScript must be evil if people abuse it like that.

--
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Re:Here we go again! by fiannaFailMan · 2004-03-24 10:52 · Score: 1

For 'enable' I meant to say 'disable.'

--
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Re:Here we go again! by fiannaFailMan · 2004-03-24 10:55 · Score: 1

Nobody's stopping you from writing a Flash player for your favourite platform.

--
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Re:Here we go again! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 11:49 · Score: 0

Flash click to view. Not perfect, but better than having to deal with flash ads.
Re:Here we go again! by smallpaul · 2004-03-25 10:08 · Score: 1

Documented is not open. The flash file format is legally encumbered.

Re:SVG & *Steganography* by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:57 · Score: 0

Are you going for a keyword karma whoring?

Nah, if he was doing that he'd at least have to spell Steganography right in the subject :)

Vector graphics came home in 1983 by acomj · 2004-03-24 05:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

With the vectrex video game system
I wonder... could those games be made to run under SVG... with frame buffering....

Fm4 ?! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 05:59 · Score: -1, Offtopic

Pro-homosexu4l into a sliNg unless of BSD/OS. A

Re: by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:03 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

SVG looks fun-Low Carb Graphics. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:04 · Score: 0

What I predict people will do is use programs like Illustrator, or equivilent. Export out, then run it through an optimizer (e.g. a circle command instead of line segments, etc). Then gzip that and you're ready to go.

Why Vector Graphics matter by mst76 · 2004-03-24 06:05 · Score: 4, Informative

It is only a natural evolution from character based displays to bitmaps to vector graphics. The main advantage of vector graphics is resolution independence. Imagine installing a very high resolution screen, and instead of everything getting smaller everything gets sharper. Want to display more information on the screen? Just seemlessly zoom in and out of your desktop. Currently, most windows systems are bitmap based, although there are some kludgy ways of adapting to different resolutions without changing the size of your text and windows and icons.

The big problem is that our current screens are just not good enough. Monitors rarely get over 150dpi, whereas even very old laser printers get 300dpi. On most screens, you can still see the individual dots. This is why zooming in and out like I described above wouldn't work on current hardware: too much detail is lost when the zoomed out desktop is rasterized to the screen. It would be only good for previewing the windows (like Apple's Expose), not for actually working with them. Note that in the area where these issues matters the most, text and font display, there has been a great amount of research and clever solutions to work around this. If (when?) display technology finally catches up, the entire windows system will be arbitrarily scaled with good quality, not just the fonts. Let's hope that when the hardware get's good enough, the software to utilize it will already be in place.

Re:Why Vector Graphics matter by jstott · 2004-03-24 07:05 · Score: 1

It is only a natural evolution from character based displays to bitmaps to vector graphics.

Except that vector terminals pre-date character terminals (many of the first video games like "Asteroids" used nothing but vector graphics). We've simply closed the loop.

-JS

--
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
Re:Why Vector Graphics matter by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 08:18 · Score: 0

The technology IS out there. IBM and VideoSonic have 200DPI LCD monitors, but they're freaking expensive and used mostly to display digital X-rays at quality approaching film X-rays, plus you need some VERY boss hardware (4 video cards...)
Re:Why Vector Graphics matter by MrBlue+VT · 2004-03-24 11:55 · Score: 1

He's not talking about vector displays. He means using vector graphics that then get rasterized to a regular pixel based display.
Re:Why Vector Graphics matter by iabervon · 2004-03-24 16:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

He he... by msimm · 2004-03-24 06:05 · Score: 1

Midi. On the web. I understand your enthusiasm more then I sympathize with your analogy. Have you been to a Geocities site with midi on it recently? ;-)

Somethings are just better left alone.

--
Quack, quack.

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) (Code) by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:06 · Score: 0

That's not SVG.

About Time! by StormyMonday · 2004-03-24 06:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's time for pixels to go away. With displays running from cellphones to graphic arts workstations, the concept just isn't useful any more above the renering level. I look forward to replacing as many as possible of the old pixel-based graphics format with something I can see at more than one display resolution.

Now if we can just get the Xwindows folks on board! When I say "12-point type", I mean a height of 6 lines per inch, not 12 pixels (enormous on the cellphone; invisible on the workstation).

--
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.

Re:About Time! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:41 · Score: 0

Now if we can just get the Xwindows folks on board! When I say "12-point type", I mean a height of 6 lines per inch, not 12 pixels (enormous on the cellphone; invisible on the workstation).

Good luck with that - let me know how it turns out.
Re:About Time! by zangdesign · 2004-03-24 08:58 · Score: 1

Now if we can just get the Xwindows folks on board! When I say "12-point type", I mean a height of 6 lines per inch, not 12 pixels (enormous on the cellphone; invisible on the workstation).

Suggest you read the following: "What is point size?" for the correct definition of point size. It's a workable measure, but only for print - it doesn't translate well to the screen and saying it's 6LPI doesn't seem correct either.

In fact, it's way more complex. The problem here is we're using a measurement for something it was not designed to be applied to. It works after a fashion, but there's gotta be a better way.

Pixels actually works pretty well on a screen, since it's an absolute reference for that screen. Your problem is the screen resolution - low on a cellphone, high on a workstation.

--
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Re:About Time! by MobyTurbo · 2004-03-24 13:14 · Score: 1

Now if we can just get the Xwindows folks on board! When I say "12-point type", I mean a height of 6 lines per inch, not 12 pixels (enormous on the cellphone; invisible on the workstation).
You can use the DisplaySize option in XF86Config to specify the physical display size, and X will automatically adjust all point values to values appropriate for your screen size.
Re:About Time! by StormyMonday · 2004-03-25 05:48 · Score: 1

You can use the DisplaySize option in XF86Config to specify the physical display size, and X will automatically adjust all point values to values appropriate for your screen size.

Huh! That's a new one on me. I'll have to give it a try ...

--
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.

No one wants it? by bonch · 2004-03-24 06:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

Hell, Y-Windows is thinking of using SVG for describing all their widgets. They plan a 1.0 release within the year.

SVG is being used almost everywhere I look. Icons are just the beginning.

Re:No one wants it? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 09:58 · Score: 0

> Icons are just the beginning.

The beginning of the end for M$. My Windows desktop already is uglier than my Linux one at work. SVG will be the nail in IE coffin. No IE + no Office = no M$.

(Well, not quite, but almost.)
Re:No one wants it? by ergo98 · 2004-03-24 14:51 · Score: 2, Insightful

SVG is seeing gradually increased mind- and market- share, however there is a foreboding cloud in the near future: Longhorn (the next generation Windows operating system) is going to implement an XML-based vector graphic technology similar to SVG (with the same fundamental advantages), but more aligned with .NET APIs and GDI (and thus incompatible with SVG). It seems logical that Internet Explorer 7 will support this format for embedded graphics, and the rest will be history -- Overnight invariably thousands of sites will support the new Microsoft. I say this from the humorously confused perspective of having written an article on SVG that was published by Microsoft's magazine.

As an aside, one of the biggest boosts to SVG, giving it some traction, would have been native support by Mozilla a year or two ago. Instead it was relegated to one-person side projects, and even for third party plug-ins new releases of Mozilla broke them.

Microsoft would by Slowtreme · 2004-03-24 06:13 · Score: 2, Funny

Who would try to embed some secret information in an XML file Didn't MS get a patent on XML file formats that have data encrypted inside them?

--
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.

Nitpicking the nitpick by bonch · 2004-03-24 06:15 · Score: 1

I just have to ask...

Who fucking cares?

Surely we have better things to concentrate our energy on than arguing over a naming scheme when referring to the kernel or to userspace. I think newbies are turned off from our community for this reason, among others.

They're going to just call it Linux. I don't see why that's a problem whatsoever. This isn't about stroking egos so that everyone's damn project gets named in reference. "GNU/XFree86/GNOME/Linux" sucks.

SVG - some obscure features by pkphilip · 2004-03-24 06:17 · Score: 4, Informative

SVG - or more specifically, the Adobe Plugin for SVG, has some interesting features that makes the use of SVG even more interesting..

The Adobe SVG provides the user a getURL() (or similar named) method which allows the browser to read information from the server or any other arbitary url on the web without any form submits of page refreshes.

This is useful, for instance, to have a stock exchange ticker which continuosly reads data from a stock exchange server and renders a graph of the values on the screen - without requiring the browser to refresh.

Another interesting aspect of SVG is that it can be compressed using gzip and so a fairly complex svg image could still be in a very small file. The data that is passed into the SVG could also be compressed.

Re:SVG - some obscure features by ispeters · 2004-03-24 08:55 · Score: 1

Slightly OT, I suppose, but you can already achieve the getURL() functionality with both Mozilla and IE in plain HTML + JavaScript pages (I don't know about Opera or Konqueror, or any other non-Gecko based browsers). IE exposed an ActiveX object to its script engine called XmlHttpRequest in about version 5.0 or so, and the Mozilla crew have cloned its functionality.

Some marketroids have called this 'inner browsing'.

Check out Microsoft's documentation on the XmlHttpRequest object, or Mozilla's version of the same thing.

Also see this document entitled Using the XML HTTP Request object.

You can also use the DOM-standard createDocument method that takes a URI as an argument if you don't want to or can't use the Microsoft-inspired XmlHttpRequest but this approach only allows GETs and not POSTs, and it forces the return to be XML, whereas the poorly named XmlHttpRequest gives you access to the entire HTTP response so you can read the plain text if you want to.

Ian

SNOW by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:20 · Score: 0

For instance, the SNOW whitespace steganography encoder.

SVG is great for GIS by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:21 · Score: 1, Interesting

There are a few nice SVG-GIS (geographic information services) sites out there: vienna and even nebraska

The next Flash by Edgetho007 · 2004-03-24 06:28 · Score: 1

Are there any project currently in development to make an OSS version of Flash using SVG? Would anyone like to start one?

Re:The next Flash by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:43 · Score: 1, Interesting

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

Re:SVG & *Steganography* by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:30 · Score: 0

Well at least he didn't spell it like shorthand writing.

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:34 · Score: 0

You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.

Great, so now we can have sound files of an infinite size!

rsvg plugin? by Webmonger · 2004-03-24 06:34 · Score: 1

Does anyone know where to find the rsvg Mozilla plugin by Dom Lachowicz?

Re:rsvg plugin? by Rahga · 2004-03-24 09:17 · Score: 1

You'll have to download and install the latest of the librsvg series, at least librsv-2.7.0

Dear Christian: by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:36 · Score: -1, Troll

Did you like how I gave you the bone hard and fast last night? I was the one wearing the sombrero...wink, wink.

Mod parent down! by temojen · 2004-03-24 06:37 · Score: 1

That's 3, Informative, at most.

RTWFA by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 06:59 · Score: 0

RT Whole FA, dumbass.

Re:RTWFA by po8 · 2004-03-24 07:17 · Score: 1

On Wed 24 Mar 10:59AM PST, Anonymous Coward wrote:
RT Whole FA, dumbass.

As you so eloquently pointed out, I managed to miss the Cairo paragraph in the main article. My apologies.

I'll be quite interested to understand the difficulties in using Cairo for SVG rendering referred to in the original article. I'll have to admit to being a bit puzzled, having watched Cairo do a nice job of rendering SVG in various places.

Again, thanks very much for your prompt correction! I only wish that you had identified yourself, so that I could credit you properly.

Doesn't work at all here.. by pherthyl · 2004-03-24 07:00 · Score: 1

Has anyone else had the problem that SVG just plain doesn't work? I'm running debian unstable and SVG doesn't work anywhere. No SVG icons in gnome, mozilla doesnt display SVG graphics, and KDE's (3.2.1) konqueror doesn't display them either. All three of these have independant SVG implementations and none of them work. Any ideas?

Re:Doesn't work at all here.. by rmm4pi8 · 2004-03-24 16:18 · Score: 1

supposedly debian turns it off because the rendering engine used by mozilla conflicts with that used by kde. i'm a mandrake guy myself, so i dont know how you'd go about fixing it, but supposedly the stuff works, its just a configuration issue. hope that helps.

--
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.

JAADNI by cdyson37 · 2004-03-24 07:01 · Score: 1

JAADEA - Just another article that doesn't explain the acronym.

Just another acronym that does not include that

WTF? FYI, IANAW, so IMHO YMMV by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 07:03 · Score: 0

WTF? FYI, IANAWriter, so IMHO YMMV.

Can't wait for SVG, JPEG, Ogg, MP3, AAC, et al support in my MMORPGs.

SVG in Mozilla conflicts with desktop environments by MisterBad · 2004-03-24 07:06 · Score: 2, Informative

So, one bummer about SVG is that you can't have it enabled in Mozilla and, say, Gnome at the same time.

Mozilla uses a hacked-up libsvg that interferes with other programs. So, SVG is turned off in Debian Mozilla packages, for instance.

--
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 07:08 · Score: 0

You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.

The last thing we need is an arbitrarily large audio format.

SVG for Webcomics by BenDeutsch · 2004-03-24 07:20 · Score: 1

I really, really hope the SVG format takes off on the web. I think it's a great format for webcomics, especially since it lets people print it out nicely.

(<shameless plug> our SVG webcomic: Pandimaniacs, also in PNG </shameless plug>)

So far, SVG still needs a plugin, like the Adobe one. Thankfully they released a Linux version, but we still have to use <object> and <embed> tags. I look forward to the day where we can use <img>, at least as an alternative. I personally have not been able to build mozilla with SVG yet, hope it gets mainstream soon.

--
Pandimaniacs: in english, german, P

Re:SVG for Webcomics by xemplify · 2004-03-24 14:33 · Score: 1

SVG is a perfect format for dynamic media works combining text, hyperlinks and graphics.

For budding web comic artists wanting to quickly generate SVG out of raster images I recommend the open-source Delineate raster to SVG converter.

Some SVG poster art is on the Delineate gallery page.

Re:Yes! Finally. Let's create an SVG desktop... by dominator · 2004-03-24 07:35 · Score: 4, Informative

I posted this on OSNews, but I'll post it again here...

I'm not sure why so many people think that SVG is slow. It doesn't have to be, even without hardware acceleration. I've done tests of librsvg vs. libpng:

Given a SVG image $s. Transform it into a PNG image $p using librsvg, Batik, or something similar. Run "gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file()" on both $p and $s. This will turn $s and $p into identical RGBA images. Time this operation. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Generally, it is no slower (if not faster!) to render $s than $p. This surprised me and quieted many "Vector graphics are too slow for the desktop" pundits.

Of course, once you start using some of the more advanced features (like certain filters), the rendering time is likely to go up. It all depends on what features you use and how you use them.

Inkscape & Animation by mughi · 2004-03-24 07:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

Downside is it costs ~$400. A bit pricey for me to goof off with. Thankfully there's Inkscape/sodipodi, but there's no animation support. It's mainly for static images.

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.

Re:Inkscape & Animation by MenTaLguY · 2004-03-24 08:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

Animation is certainly part of our charter. At the moment our architectural changes aren't directed at animation specifically, though they should make animation easier to implement.

I'm not expecting to see any serious movement on animation for another few quarters yet (there's still some serious design work to do in that area), but OTOH my colleagues keep surprising me, so you never know... ^_^

--

DNA just wants to be free...
Re:Inkscape & Animation by bcrowell · 2004-03-24 13:20 · Score: 2, Interesting

Wow, Inkscape is really nice! Until reading the article, I'd only known about Sodipodi, which is also excellent. This is a real embarassment of riches to have two good vector graphics editing programs to choose from. Soon I'll be able to stop maintaining my Mac, whose only purpose in life now is to run Illustrator. Woo hoo!

--
Find free books.

/.NFN by DrSkwid · 2004-03-24 07:46 · Score: 1

FYI IAAN

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

my start menu by DrSkwid · 2004-03-24 07:58 · Score: 2, Funny

ls /bin

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter

Re:my start menu by aardvarkjoe · 2004-03-24 09:31 · Score: 1

Weakling.

find / -type f -perm -001

--

How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Re:my start menu by F2F · 2004-03-24 12:10 · Score: 1

plan9% find / -type f -perm -001 find: '/bin/find' file does not exist plan9%
Re:my start menu by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 13:13 · Score: 0

Bah, even Windows can do better than that.
C:\>find / -type f -perm -001 /bin/822-date /bin/a2p.exe /bin/a2ps.exe /bin/access.exe /bin/aclocal /bin/activation-cli ent.exe /bin/addftinfo.exe /bin/addr2line.exe / bin/addr2name.awk
(and so on)

Gimme something for quick sketches! by aquarian · 2004-03-24 08:02 · Score: 1

For ages I've longed for something to make and share quick sketches with my collegues. A picture is worth a thousand words, so to speak. And sometimes it seems to take a thousand words to explain what could be drawn in a quick sketch. The trouble is, bitmapped formats suck for line drawings, and breaking out Flash tools for a quick sketch is a bit much. So gimme a quick, easy vector format, that my friends can read in their browsers and email clients!

Re:Gimme something for quick sketches! by darnok · 2004-03-24 12:57 · Score: 1

Check out sodipodi - it's pretty easy to use it as a primitive "paint" program to produce SVG-format files, which sounds like what you want.
Re:Gimme something for quick sketches! by wombatmobile · 2004-03-24 19:34 · Score: 1

e-Picture Pro is a quick sketch program that outputs SVG (and SVGT for mobile devices)

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by RAMMS+EIN · 2004-03-24 08:04 · Score: 1

``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.''

I think that's basically what .MOD does.

--
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.

SVG = Bloat! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 08:07 · Score: 0

The problem of SVG is most of the space are taken up by command strings. Instead of opcodes, we have command strings that can have infinite length. Embedded objects have to be expanded into mime64 format, which adds 33% to every byte of data. Even with compressions, it still adds considerable amount of data that can be saved by binary equivalent, such as WebCGM. The whole issue of human readable code is only relevant when people are reading it, not when the processing are done by machines. The whole SVG spec sounds like Postscript/PDF all over again. Such kind of bloat is not acceptable in a world filled with Windoze machines. If we were to make SVG as a viable choice for GUI, just use WebCGM. WebCGM is a W3C open standard, handles vector and raster data, but without the bloat of SVG.

SVG+SMIL = Flash; Mozilla Needs SMIL! by Vagary · 2004-03-24 08:27 · Score: 2, Informative

SVG is very useful on its own, but having an open alternative to Flash would be even better. SMIL, a W3C Recommended standard for adding timing and animation to things like SVG and XHTML, is that alternative.

The Mozilla team has (wrongly, IMO) decided to leave full SMIL implementation to plugins. However, the W3C has designated a subset of the SMIL 2.0 modules as being suitable for integration with XHTML, which is obviously functionality that belongs in the browser and is already available in IE6.

To keep Mozilla competitive, allow SVG to reach its full potential, and help kill Flash, I'd like to encourage everyone to vote for two Bugzilla bugs:

If you don't already have a Bugzilla account, you can get one painlessly -- if you use Mozilla you owe it to the community to help direct the project.

Re:SVG+SMIL = Flash; Mozilla Needs SMIL! by k_head · 2004-03-24 11:27 · Score: 1

"To keep Mozilla competitive"

Keep it competitive with what? IE?

If browsers won on features IE would be dead now.

--
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
Re:SVG+SMIL = Flash; Mozilla Needs SMIL! by Vagary · 2004-03-24 11:53 · Score: 1

In the original discussion of SMIL in Mozilla, someone says that it is an "IE parity issue". I've also heard Mozilla developers claim a desire that no excuses exist for staying with IE. The way I see it is that, yes, Mozilla is already superior to IE. However, since IE in bundled Mozilla needs to be better in every way to win. Certainly W3C standards are the most defensible area to match features on!

And lets face it: Microsoft research does come up with a few good ideas. They usually end up with mangled implementations, but that doesn't mean open source should ignore the abstract innovations.
Re:SVG+SMIL = Flash; Mozilla Needs SMIL! by k_head · 2004-03-24 17:12 · Score: 1

My point is that people who think Mozilla can "win" or "compete" with IE are under a delusion. Mozilla is already 50 times better then IE and yet the only people who use it are geeks like us.

--
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by Eil · 2004-03-24 08:31 · Score: 1

I think your description of MIDI might be throwing people off.

MIDI is best thought of as a nothing more than stream of events, usually a series of note beginnings and note endings and some other music-related paraphenalia. No "sounds" at all are in the data stream (though I'd be surprised if some implementations didn't have this as an extention).

Whereas a snippet of SVG might say something like, "draw this curve here with such-and-such an angle at this location in reference to center", a snippet of MIDI might say, "play this note of such-and-such octave for a certain duration."

The quality of both SVG and MIDI will depend on the tool that's being used to render them. It's indeed possible to have an SVG image rendered with no antialiasing in 16 colors by one program (likely a cell phone) and then have the same image rendered in 16 millions colors at 1600x1200 antialiased glory-filled pixels in another. Similarly, you can play a MIDI file on a $2 synth PC sound card and it'll sound just a bit better than an old NES. Play the same well-sequenced MIDI file in a full-blown multi-thousand dollar sound studio and the average Joe would have a hard time believing that it wasn't a real orchestra.

Web bug by StrawberryFrog · 2004-03-24 08:31 · Score: 1

he Adobe SVG provides the user a getURL() (or similar named) method which allows the browser to read information from the server or any other arbitary url on the web without any form submits of page refreshes.

Given that SVG looks like it will be all over the place, this "feature" will have to be carefully watched. You could do web bugs

--

My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog

Better user experience with maps by wombatmobile · 2004-03-24 08:59 · Score: 1

With bitmap maps each zoom or pan requires a trip back to the server and a drudgy delay for the user. SVG makes for a better user experience with zoom and pan using one set of data on the client.

And with SVG it is easy to add animations such as a bus or a train onto the map.

Re:Better user experience with maps by jfengel · 2004-03-24 09:13 · Score: 1

Please, no animations. I already have blinking gifs turned off, and flash-click-to-view installed.

Besides, the most useful thing to me on a Mapquest map is the ability to print it. Almost by definition, that page is something whose greatest utility to me is when I'm driving and away from my computer. So until they get blinking toner, it's probably best to leave them as static maps.

Transcode Office to SVG by wombatmobile · 2004-03-24 09:04 · Score: 2, Informative

SVGmaker transcodes Office documents to SVG. Some sample documents at the site.

"Links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled" by Vagary · 2004-03-24 09:09 · Score: 2, Informative

Teach me not to test my links! The bugs mentioned in the parent are #231729 and #216462.

Does anybody know why Bugzilla does this?

Re:"Links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled" by JohnFluxx · 2004-03-24 09:43 · Score: 1

because people would complain on slashdot about some bug and ask people to vote for it, and 10,000's would then vote for it, screwing up the system.

(not that the voting means anything anyway..)
Re:"Links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled" by Vagary · 2004-03-24 10:23 · Score: 1

But since everybody only gets 10 votes, isn't the system working just fine when a bug gets attention? Yes, I'm lobbying on behalf of those bugs, but that's because I think they're important. (Which is the same reason NGOs lobby governments in real life.) If I'm not allowed to ask other people to vote on a bug, then the system is screwed up.

As for bugs mattering, I always figured that they influenced developers ceteris paribus ("all other things being equal"). It's inconvenient for me to figure out who fixes a particular bug, so I can only show my appreciation in advance. But certainly in a gift culture, developers will devote their time to tasks yielding higher appreciation.

In this case I would appreciate having those bugs fixed so much that I lobby for them on Slashdot. I don't feel as strongly against all the bugs I vote for, but this is all I can do in the abscence of weighted votes.
Re:"Links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled" by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 11:20 · Score: 0

Ironically, you can fix this with Mozilla browsers by setting network.http.sendRefererHeader. Just stick

user_pref("network.http.sendRefererHeader", 0);

into your user.js. Interestingly enough, I don't have this turned off, but the links work for me...maybe they're getting stripped by a proxy or something...yup, I have proxy resetting the referer to the host. That's probably a better solution anyways...which is probably why I did it.
Re:"Links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled" by Error27 · 2004-03-24 17:17 · Score: 1

Because slashdot slashdots their pitiful database and no one can get any work done. It happenned a couple times and people got upset.
Re:"Links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled" by tunah · 2004-03-24 21:30 · Score: 1

What I want to know is, if opening stuff in new tabs kills the referer like everyone said, why can't I open that link?

--
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban

OpenOffice Support? by jabuzz · 2004-03-24 09:12 · Score: 1

When I can import a SVG image into OpenOffice then it will be useful. In the meantime SVG is really rather useless, because there is precious little that will import your nice SVG digram, graph, or whatever.

Re:OpenOffice Support? by halivar · 2004-03-24 10:03 · Score: 1

The problem, in this case, is not SVG. It's OpenOffice. They need to support SVG (and I'm sure they will, the year after Microsoft does).

PS: I use OO.o exclusively, just calling it fairly.

It is amazing.. by networkGhettoWhore · 2004-03-24 09:29 · Score: 0

Just about a year ago i remember there was a SVG story here on /., and i was amazed to see how many nay-sayers there were posting that SVG would never really succeeed. More than 10 people pointed out that Adobe has not even developed the SVG plugin in years and stopped supporting it.

Now it seems as though the majority of people here are very strongly supporting it and rallying behind it. At least thats a start.

--
Natural Selection: self-destruction of the poor and lazy

Re:It is amazing.. by tomdarch · 2004-03-24 11:50 · Score: 1

I like SVG enough that I'm putting a lot of hours into a database-->svg-->web thingy. That said, no one is going to use it until IE supports SVG either "out of the box" or with a plug-in that is small and highly reliable. Sadly, SVG isn't going to be part of your grannie's browser for years. At least for what I want to do with it, I'm jousting windmills (but it's fun!)

Discussions by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 09:29 · Score: 0

hey there!
I tried to follow this discussion right here but it gained to be a bit too big for me now to easily follow it .. hell I've never expected such a lot of replies now that's great!
I'd advise to continue this really COOL discussion on the SVG-Cafe (http://www.svg-cafe.com), I like that as its a lot easier to navigate on that one.. here's the direct link to the new thread that I've created, would be glad to see you all there!! Here's the THREAD!

See ya there,
Tha SVGEvangelist

Ooooops.. forgive me ;) by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 09:31 · Score: 0

hey there again,

Sorry got the url wrong for the Link to the thread to discuss all this here on an easier way, here we go again: SVG and its Future on Desktop, Mobiles and other Devices!

Tha SVGEvangelist

gah by e.m.rainey · 2004-03-24 09:40 · Score: 0, Troll

You Know I'm really starKing to get sicK of the naminK Konventions for KDE.

--
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.

Re:gah by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 18:07 · Score: 0

gYou gKnow GI'm Greally gstarting gto Gget gsick Gof gGnome Gtrolls.

SVG link by pmsyyz · 2004-03-24 10:18 · Score: 1

I think a better link for SVG would be to http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/, which has news and links to the various specs, instead of linking to the SVG recommendation.

--
Phillip

Re:SVG in Mozilla conflicts with desktop environme by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 10:23 · Score: 0

Adobe updated their linux SVG plugin last Dec. and it now works with the latest mozilla.

-1 tard, buy a mac instead by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 11:00 · Score: 0

why do you think that you should use vector graphics just to resize them? blowing up vector graphics looks like ass because it turns into cartoons. so given that you're going to start from a canonical representation and just make it smaller, using a smart scaling algorithm is the way to go. way less complexity than vector graphics and it looks better, too (unless you plan to to put a raytracer in that vector format). have you ever looked at the mac os x icons?

SVG for Webcomics-More by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 11:02 · Score: 0

Here's another site that's done in SVG (click around).

Here's another implimentation SVGL done in OpenGL.

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by cfuse · 2004-03-24 11:26 · Score: 1

Or even make Christina Agulera sing Spear's songs.

What's the damn difference?

For you word twisting sickos by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 11:49 · Score: 0

I meant large solid objects...

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by Heretik · 2004-03-24 12:47 · Score: 1

! .... I'm speechless.

Please learn what the hell MIDI even is before proposing that it gets reinvented, kthx.

(Hint: nothing is stopping you from doing everything you proposed right now, with MIDI exactly as it is - MIDI doesn't, and shouldn't (ever) have anything to do with sound creation)

-1 tard, get a clue instead by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 12:55 · Score: 0

OS X icons are vector based but saved as bitmaps in different sizes. Kinda like KDE's: 128x128, 64x64, 32x32 and so on, but I don't know the actual numbers.

What OS X does more, is scaling the icons on the fly between those descrite resolutions. And I must admit the algorithm that does that is very good indeed.

Adobe plugin by MisterBad · 2004-03-24 13:23 · Score: 1

I don't think a proprietary plugin for a W3C standard is really a good answer for this problem. Mozilla has the XML and display infrastructure to make SVG work. It just needs to be diddled a bit to work with free desktop libraries.

--
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/

Raster to SVG converter by xemplify · 2004-03-24 14:17 · Score: 1

To convert raster images into SVG, I recommend the open-source Delineate raster to SVG converter.

The Delineate gallery page has several web poster art SVG images, including my favorite war and peace.

Interactive data visualizations with SVG by xemplify · 2004-03-24 15:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

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!

Wikipedia by students · 2004-03-24 16:51 · Score: 1

All of Wikipedia is a victim.

--
Simon's Rock College

SVG Authoring by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-24 17:29 · Score: 0

SVG native authoring
- Sodipodi (linux)
- Inkscape (linux)
- Sketsa (cross platform/java)
- Evolgraphix XStudio (Windows ???)
- Jasc WebDraw (Windows)

other non native, but export to svg
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe GoLive
- Corel suites
- Scribus (linux)
- etc

viewer
-Adobe SVG Viewer
-Corel SVG Viewer
-Apache Batik (Java)
-Mobiform

SVG library
-librsvg (linux)
-Apache Batik (Java)
-SharpVector (dotNet)

other info on SVG
-http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/

someone care to add?

Re:SVG Authoring by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-25 05:57 · Score: 0

Karbon 14 from KDE
http://www.koffice.org/karbon/

mod parent +9 hilarious by subtropolis · 2004-03-24 18:41 · Score: 1

I didn't say it had to be "secret".

Well, just send an email, then. Seriously - the whole point of steganography is to hide data in the 'random' bits you get with compressed JPEGs. SVG is friggin' world-readble plain-text that's interpreted at the client (ok, that describes *any* data read by a client, but still).

Hiding messages in SVG is more ridiculous than redacting data in PDFs by placing a black box over the text.

--
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.

Examples of SVG Technical Drawings by wombatmobile · 2004-03-24 19:31 · Score: 1

SVG examples made from Windows CAD programs

hehe by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-25 05:14 · Score: 0

I can empathise with this; we've all concentrated on our breathing as children; love the socks one...

GrimRC

inkscape and sodipodi - ( linux / windows / mac ) by Simarilius · 2004-03-25 06:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

both these apps work on more than just linux. in fact from the SF stats the majority of users are win32 folks.

Re:SVG is the best thing ever! (Addendum) by Rysc · 2004-03-25 13:29 · Score: 1

"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."

Better yet, just do midi-style music with custom wav "instruments" rolled into the file. Oh wait, that's a tracker format!

So what you really want is a tracker format with some extra sparkly bits.

--
I want my Cowboyneal

Let's review . . . by Anonymous Coward · 2004-03-25 15:38 · Score: 0

- Macromedia loves SVG because they want to kill off that Flash format--no that's not right ...

- Uh, Microsoft loves SVG because it will obviate the need for XAML and make Longhorn, umm, stillborn--ah, wait a sec. ...

- Oh yeah, now Adobe, yeah Adobe! they got that great plug-in--never mind that the plug-in's moribund and Adobe's got to have a major internal conflict over SVG vs. PDF...

Tell me again _which_ major player is going to make SVG a roaring success ? ? ?

And, no, 'Mozilla' (or insert your favorite OSS project here) is not a valid answer.
OK, not a valid answer unless what you are really saying is that an OSS OS platform is (finally!) going to succeed on the desktop (client)--and before Longhorn becomes 'real'. That's a valid answer, but to a different question, IMHO.

(And for you conspiracy theorists out there, no, I _don't_ work for Microsoft. But I've been hearing that 'SVG' is the 'next big thing' in rendering for, oh about 5+ years now and the joke is beginning to wear a bit thin!)

Re:Yes! Finally. Let's create an SVG desktop... by theendlessnow · 2004-03-29 12:40 · Score: 1

That was a whole lot funnier than my post. You are saying that rendering hundreds of words of text all done with vectors is as fast? You are saying that you can render 1,000,000 vector objects faster (or just as fast) to the screen than a single raster formatted image?? Maybe if cached the final rastered result... but that's not vector anymore is it? Only in the most simplistic cases is vector rendering going to be faster(or nearly as fast). I suppose we can all simplify our desktops to get rid of the eye candy that will make SVG based desktops crawl... I do not see any information to support your position on this. In fact, history has show this to be incorrect, over and over again. With that said... anyone who knows me... knows that I am a champion of vector graphics development (and creator of vector based image editing applications). It is my preferred format. I like the end result, but it will never be the speedy desktop choice.

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SVG And The Free Desktop (s)

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