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Biochemistry Animations Using SVG
Milo Fungus writes "I've been working on a project for my biochemistry research lab that may be of interest to a few Slashdotters. We study the enzymes in an important biochemical pathway that produces (among other things) terpenes, carotenes, and sterols. I have been making a web-based tutorial to summarize our research, with animations of the proposed reaction mechanisms of the enzymes. I'm finding that SVG is a very good tool for the job because it is easy to learn (because of my experience with HTML) and the file sizes are amazingly small, even for complex animations. The files are typically ~5 KB for a g-zipped animation about 1:00 minute long, compared to 2 MB or more for a lossy-compressed video file of the same length, which is locked into a certain resolution. I have been wanting to do this project ever since I saw Hongyun Wang and George Oster's animations of ATP synthase. I would appreciate any feedback about the tutorial's usablilty, etc."
I'm hopelessly depressed to see how little interest there appears to be on Slashdot with regards to SVG animations in web browsers.
Is SVG not our only hope to usurp Macromedia's proprietary hold on all things vector on the internet?
Sorry to wimper... Eric
Ok, I've already mentioned that you need a mac viewer. For those people who use these macs.
Your inspiration's example is terrible - with respect to bandwidth.
It is good because it has Mpeg AND Quicktime. That's a choice that is nice. Almost everything plays mpeg1 and quicktime is a FREE and easy to get download that is xplat.
The bandwidth on the QT is terrible - 852 Kbps. It is using the wrong codec.
The bandwidth on the Mpeg 1 is also rather high - 355 Kbks.
Quality on both is good.
Bandwidth can be improved by exporting the quicktime to Sorenson or 3ivx and running a few comparison tests to compare quality and bandwidth.
What is LOVELY about 3ivx is that is can create pure MPEG 4 output so Quicktime can create a movie that can be played outside of quicktime. Like in WMP.
Using 3ivx I was able to get the videos output as pure MPEG 4 at almost identical quality at 150 K per second with just a few tests. That's taking a 5 meg movie and turning it to 860 K. I'm sure we could do better if we tried.
Now, If you've got a mac plugin, I'd love to see those 5 K movies!!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I wish Mozilla (and friends) would ship with --enable-svg compiled by default.
I know the SVG implementation in Mozilla isn't 100% (the builds I've tried do crash more often), but neither has the DOM-JavaScript implementation been 100% in all the major browsers all these years, and we've worked around it (albeit a pain but) with great success.
I say turn SVG on by default and let the SVG websites a cometh. Soon enough you'll have the Mozilla crowd surfing a slew of fantastic SVG sites and their IE friends will be jumping ship in droves.
You can wet your whistle by grabbing the Mozilla-Firefox SVG build for Linux/Solaris and experience the fantastic SVG work at Croczilla. The bezier-paths demo shows some serious potential.
The progression for better SVG implementation in Mozilla (or any browser for that matter) will go hand in hand with the easy availability for the user to be able to browse these websites w/o jumping through hoops.
<last-blurb-of-nonsense>SVG is a native implementation in Mozilla, so the end effect is completely smooth and transparent unlike Macromedia's Flash which feels like a browser afterthought.</last-blurb-of-nonsense>