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SVG And The Free Desktop (s)
unmadindu writes "Christian Schaller has written an interesting article on SVG's current and possible uses on the GNU/Linux desktop. Though the article concentrates mostly on GNOME, it does mention the excellent work the KDE developers have been doing with KSVG, and refers to the upcoming SVG support in Mozilla too."
Would it have killed you to say Scalable Vector Graphics once in the article?
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
Just another article that doesn't explain the acronym.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm wondering when SVG will become Flash. Or am I comparing apples and oranges here?
-What have you contributed lately?
They're great for displaying technical drawings. I'd like to see more architectual diagrams on the web, both software architecture and the physical type. With bitmapped graphics, web designers are pretty much limited to small low resolution images, dumbing down detail to a marketroid white sheet level. Vector graphics scale very well for diagrams and cad drawings.
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.
I hear Osama is hiding in a specifically crafted xml document.
I recently dabbled in SVG for a website. I learned with that and a dash of javascript I could completely replace a java applet with a few kilobytes of code.
SVG is finding its way into everything, browsers, icons, etc. I forsee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.
As a matter of fact that is a good analogy: MIDI vs WAV. One is intrections on how to draw the other is the final outcome.
Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters. Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.
SVG also fixes the pixelation issue, whenyou try to stretch and compress the image. As a matter of fact, do that once with a regualr image and you're working with crap. You can shrink SVG blow it up, and rotate without any kind of distortion.
It is kind of suprising it took us this long to get a cross-platform standard on how to specify how to draw shapes! But it is a good thing.
I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This could make for some really interesting desktops, if this is what I think it is. Make some interesting graphical effects within icons or as the desktop without dragging the system down. I can see a new type of desktop where the start menu is replaced by an interactive desktop background. Personally, I hate the damn start menu (including the Linux implementations) as an incredibly ineffieicient way to organize menus. But, that's just my opinion- obviously someone has to like it.
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:
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.
Yes, I do know it was a troll.
Famous Last Web Development Words
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
The best way to do this is with vector based graphics, which is what SVG is.
... so I can finally use my 8 way Opteron with 16GB to its fullest potential!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.