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Firefox 1.1 Plans Native SVG Support
Spy Hunter writes "The Scalable Vector Graphics format has yet to take off on the web, perhaps due to a small installed base of SVG-enabled browsers. That could soon change as the latest Firefox 1.1 nightly builds have started coming with native SVG support compiled in and enabled by default. If this feature makes into the Firefox 1.1 release (which is not certain, but likely, as the developers want it to happen) it will increase the number of web users who have an SVG renderer installed. But perhaps more interesting than that is the possibility of mixing SVG graphic elements directly into the markup of regular XHTML pages, freeing vector graphics from the small rectangle of a browser plugin and opening up a host of exciting new possibilities for web developers. This is enabled by the integration of SVG directly into the Gecko rendering engine, instead of as a browser plugin. With such a useful web developer feature available only in Firefox, could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?"
It contains the fix for the rendering of Slashdot's invalid HTML!
Its failure to take off prolly has nothing to do with the ubiquitious support for Flash...
could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?"
No, because IE will adopt a slightly different version of SVG and by virtue of it already containing 80% of the market, will force firefox to display the IE-compatible SVG, and things will be the same as ever before.
Monopolies, y'know?
Opera 8.0 has support for SVG-tiny. The question is - what does SVG full have which SVG tiny does not?
Opera 8.0 supports SVG, and so will IE7. Looks like all the top browsers will soon support SVG...
Now I'm gonna have to go out and buy an SVG Monitor.
Had you written this post a year ago, you would've said "90%" of the market. How much you wanna bet it'll be down to 70% or lower in another year?
More broken pages! I love it when browser nazis decide what browser works best for our needs. Evidently more and more people have less and less to say. I remember when http was hyper TEXT transfer protocal.
...will eventually be widely adopted, but it will be only hours before a spammer uses it to block spam filters--random graphical elements, scattered in the middle of words?
And you thought cyrillic characters were bad.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
i hope they insert more features in firefox. More it has the more ie users will switch to it.
Can someone explain to me why its better than a jpg?
This post has been filtered for sanity.
Wow! Imagine how much more exciting it will be to punch the monkey!!
...but I have only a VGA monitor you insenstive clown!
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
"With such a useful web developer feature available only in Firefox, could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?"
... just like they have for PNG and (proper) CSS2.
No.
First of all, it's also available in Opera 8.
Second of all, at the risk of sounding like a troll, people will simply find ways around using SVG until IE supports it
Who doesn't like free music?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
This is really cool, since it will allow the Javascript SVG library I wrote to work without the adobe plugin!
Javascript SVG Sparklines
from http://svg.kde.org/
STABLE VECTORS
2004-02-18 18:38:29 by Andreas Streichardt KDE 3.2 has been released and thus KSVG is stable now. If you want to have KSVG installed on your system please install the kdegraphics package. The KSVG team wishes happy vectoring. Please report any bugs via http://bugs.kde.org./
-- Bryan
Take a look at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/About.html for more information on SVG.
freeing vector graphics from the small rectangle of a browser plugin and opening up a host of exciting new possibilities for web developers
Sounds like a whole new annoying type of advertising coming our way.
I work a lot with Databases, and their schema.
I'm also sick and tired of wallpapering my cubial with schema print out from the plotter. SVG DB schema would be an excellent tool to have- go from a 30,000 ft view to a grass blade view with out having to load up different pages, or deal with a wall paper print out.
Someone wanna make the tool?
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I used to use Corel and WordPerfect Presentations, which has a propriety vector graphics format, WPG.
Come on, the best browser on the planet doesn't pass Acid2 test. You ARE committed to standards, aren't you, folks?
"With such a useful web developer feature available only in Firefox, could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?"
With the continual complaints I see about people irritated by sites that use features only supported by IE, and that cause the page to render incorrectly in other browsers, why would developers using Firefox-only features be any different or better?
The keyword is best. Lets just hope some webmasters don't start doing what some IE designers have done, blocked out an entire website because of not using the correct browser. Most of the sites that say my Firefox is "not up-to-date as the latest Interenet Explorer" will render just fine, if they hadn't put up blockades to their content.
It's their loss.
The bookmarks on the left side don't show the URL fast enough when point at the link with a mouse.Using the menu bookmarks covers up the URL .
I also noticed some 'websites' have found a way to not show the link url in firefox. Opera doesn't have this problem.
Won't it be regarded as an embrace-or-extend move by Mozilla? Is there some relevant standard (except for SVG itself) for this? Is there some graceful degradation mechanism built-in for browsers that don't support this feature?
That said, sounds like a cool feature with lots of potential uses.
http://www.inkscape.org/
Spine World
(From TFA) "With such a useful web developer feature available only in Firefox, could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?""
Sure, if the webmasters are fucking retards.
Think about it, if you use SVG all over your site and say "Download Firefox or you wont be able to view this site." the 9X% (I use 9X since no one agrees on numbers.) Internet Explorer users would simply hit the back button and go find somewhere else to get whatever they were wanting from your site.
The only case where that might be acceptable is maybe in a situation where there is only a few users or where you are the exclusive provider of information on a topic.
So yes, webmasters will start telling users that they have to use FF to view their website... if they're fucking retards.
ND
This statement is forty-five characters long.
I'd love to see Mapquest/GoogleMaps/etc start sending maps in SVG. They currently use low-resolution formats for the screen, and they look terrible when printed, especially street names. They're also hard to zoom in on. And I'd like to think that it might be smaller to send the map vectorized than sending every pixel. (The blank spaces compress nicely, but text-as-graphic doesn't.)
Google Maps is a significant advance over what I've seen at Mapquest/Yahoo Maps, but they can do a lot better.
They could have used PDF, but that requires a separate and not-very-interactive application, or Flash, but that's plain evil. SVG really is the way to go for this.
Won't that take loads of bits for anything more than simplest?
> could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?
:-(
:-)
Please noooooo! I use Konqueror for all my web browsing. It works for about 95% of the sites I want to visit - I don't want that number to go down
I think Konqueror supports SVG but I don't suppose it supports embedding it directly in XHTML.
OTOH, when the KDE port of Firefox is done (yes, there is one!) then I won't mind so much
Well, I'm not sure if it can count as a standard already, but at least the w3 is working on it:
V G-20020809/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-XHTMLplusMathMLplusS
And BTW, the XHTML + MathML part of this has been implemented in Firefox for a long time, and I love it. No hassle with putting every formula in a separate MathML document.
... acid2 is a relatively orthogonal issue.
:)
Also, acid2 support will be noticed by very people. SVG support will be relevant to everyone who uses the browser.
Not that I'm sure that the relevance will be in a net positive way, mind you.
Opera 8 already supports native SVG. Firefox is lagging behind yet again.
Nice, then I won't have to compile mozilla to run the Visualhistory plugin: WebMap It's a wonderfull way to get a grip of your surfinghistory, which IMHO isn't that good by default. Sadly the guy who made it is form Japan, do most of the doc is quiete unreadable for most people.
I believe that browser history has been neglected for a long time.
This integrated-SVG is planned for FireFox 1.1 and already available in Opera 8.
Closed-source software rules, at least sometimes :-)
It's about time! :)
I always thought Mozilla's smooth and transparent SVG implementation was leaps and bounds over Macromedia's Flash plugin which feels like a second-hand browser afterthought.
I envision thousands of pages springing up w/sweet SVG content running in Firefox/Opera only (WebCore/KHtml too?). As Internet "power" users will naturally want the full Internet experience... they'll jump the IE ship in droves!
An earlier poster claimed IE would have support for SVG (via the buggy Adobe SVG plugin?), but I don't imagine IE will implement this natively for 7.0. Again, I question IE's support for SVG until I see a substantiated web reference claiming so.
Note: Current bee's knees for SVG samples: http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/
SVG support are great news for our beloved Firefox but what, IMHO, would be a killer feature will be XForms support in order to make all those akward "tecnologies?" like ASP, JSP, JSF, tiles and such to "softly and suddenly vanish away".
AFAIK the XForms Mozilla project http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/ is progressing right but it will just be great if it could also be available too.
Regards.
Look at Greasemonkey, You can do this today in FF
Help fight continental drift.
Sadly, SVG really wasn't adopted. I hope that its inclusion in Opera and Firefox will change all of that, because many websites that currently use images for a lot of their content could make things look better and take up less space with things like CSS2 and SVG.
Saving bandwidth is still important in these days of broadband and whatnot, because the more you cut down the amount of unnecessary stuff zapping across the 'net, the more cool stuff that really requires the bandwidth (like movies, music, and all that stuff "they've" been promising us since the 80's with "convergence") will be able to get through.
Combine the powerful client-stuff you can do with all these standards with server-side dynamic generation and you end up with a system that should be able to display any type of content with no problem.
"Opera 8.0 has support for SVG-tiny. The question is - what does SVG full have which SVG tiny does not?"
A lousy diet plan.
Clothing optional!
Now look at the big picture. Semantic web with pictures that actually can be indexed and searched. Combine that with all the other "X" stuff that the w3c is doing, and...let the fun begin!
SVG needs what Fonts have. Hinting in order to scale properly across the entire range.
Can't we already mix SVG (when otherwise supported) by including it in a DIV layer?
--
make install -not war
Jasc Webdraw
Microsoft may alternately try to come up with their on completely proprietary version of SVG supported only in IE, but I think they would have a hard time now getting major support for IE only view of websites. Ah what a difference a year or two makes.
Keep on raising the bar FireFox -- make Microsoft support open standards instead of coming up with closed solutions on their own to fill a vacuum.
As for people complaining there will soon be too many unviewable sites in [insert your favorite browser], what major site would code to a base of 5%? More likely they would offer two ways to view the same content until the other browsers come on board. It'll never happen if you don't let new functionality in. No one wants Microsoft driving the evolution of Web standards (OK the folks in Redmond do).
Unlike Microsoft products and backward compatibility, these improvements will be well greeted because they won't break old HTML.
Letter To Iran
When you open up the SVG door, you don't just make space for "pretty pictures." You ALSO get,...
As SVG comes on line, at both the web-browser level and the desktop-programming level, and as people become proficient in these things, we'll make a major step forward in user interface.
Working with graphs will change the way we think. Our tools have, so far, afforded creating hierarchical structures. That is, it's far easier to express hierarchy with text editors, than it is to express network. Hierarchy is fine, but it's only part of the picture. The other part is more-biological looking network organizations. As the tools come online to create biological organizations (as we see appearing in message-oriented programming models, component based developments,) we'll think about programming (and perhaps our world) in very different ways.
To make this a little clearer: If you look in magazine articles where they're discussing programming architecture and software layout, you're going to see lots of 2D diagrams with lots of pieces plugging into other pieces in a graphical layout- sort of like a circuit board. This is different than the way we have traditionally programmed, which is more like a tree shape. Even within object oriented programming, because our interface still affords tree layouts. Where we have explored beyond tree layouts, (complex networks of design patterns,) we have struggled with the user interface, and people have stretched out to make better representations that capture graph-like programs: Think of your clumbsy UML editors, and things like that- really trying to hack a solution between more-or-less linear code expressions, and the 2D graphs that we're thinking in.
When SVG is well understood, documented, with tools at desktop and web levels, we should start to see native 2D programming languages, that don't feel like either toy languages, or cheap hacks riding on top of other programming languages.
I've written more about this at Futures:SvgRevolution.
could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?
I bloody well hope not. If I do I'll know that the website(s) in question have been designed by idiots. As Tim Berners-Lee states in Technology Review, July 1996:
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
So any sites saying "best viewed with..." are run by idiots - whether that "browser X" be Firefox, IE, Safari, Konqueror or even Lynx etc. etc.
Websites should be written to standards so they can be viewed by users in the browser of their choice. This is especially true to allow access for disabled users. That's the whole fucking point of the web.
And it's another reason that having Flash only websites is the WORST thing you can do. A colleague of mine at work is visually impaired and has to use a 21" monitor at 640 by 480 with a high contrast scheme. He still has to read the text by putting his face about 10" from the screen and scanning across the monitor. Flash websites are totally inaccessible to him.
And every day the internet fills up with crappy flash covered apologies for web pages built by idiots, for idiots, Ho hum...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
CURL (Google for it) can do some impressive stuff.
If Firefox were to support both natively, I am confident it would become the de-facto standard browser for scientists and engineers almost overnight. It's already the de-facto standard for many (since linux adoption is much higher in the tech world), but MathML and SVG at once would make firefox the killer browser for the too-smart-for-their-own-good crowd.
I swear to God, while reading your reply and glancing to my winamp to the right, I thought I read
"view porn between 0 and 10^-100(X)"
and I had to do a double-take.
SVG Tiny, not SVG Full. Opera is still behind.
so how long until Google maps are served as SVGs? ;)
Im gonna have to diig through lots of floppies to find the site :)
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It's the best format for posting my analysis of the Senate voting record:
n ate20050428.svg
http://bolson.org/gov/us/senate/2005/distgraph/se
For fewer bytes I post better data than a comparable PNG.
Start Running Better Polls
Sure, that's great - the installed base will go from less than 1% of browsers supporting SVG to something huge like 4%...
Right, but think about this - the vector graphic describes lines. However, that does not equate to "infinite resolution". It does mean that you don't get "jaggies" on that line as you go larger. However, what does happen is that you may not have enough "lines" to display well at a larger resolution. What looked good with 200 lines at a small resolution may look like total crap at a high resolution.
Boy I'm glad to see this day come. Ever since we started inkscape, I keep running across little ways SVG would improve on the web experience...
For displaying data in a table, this could allow vertical or angled titles in the table header, like you'd do in a spreadsheet to fit more columns in.
You know all those spiffy graphically laid out GUI's you always see in SciFi shows? You could *totally* do that sort of thing in SVG. You'd need some sort of animation support (which Inkscape lacks currently), and clipping regions to do it right.
A while back I wrote a tool called rackview for browsing the machines in a data center, starting with a top view, then 'zooming' in on a rack, then down to the individual machine. The problem is that rendering the screens using HTML tables looks like ass. Being able to have the database tool generate SVG directly (rather than some hacky svg->png->imagemaps) would simplify the tool greatly. I can imagine there are probably other MANY other such needs for graphical, web-driven interfaces out there.
Depending on how good the SVG support in the browsers is, this opens up fertile ground for game developers. True, they're doing this with flash already, but being able to mix SVG and HTML together opens up possibilities that aren't feasible with Flash alone.
Downsides? I phear what advertisers figure out to do with this... We're going to have to go through another round of figuring out techniques for ad blocking pretty soon. ;-)
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I actually just tried out Friday's nightly yesterday. Up to now I've been relying on the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV) 6.0 Beta in Firefox, along with some advice from surfers using the SVG-enabled Mozilla. It definitely looks cool and seems to render faster than ASV. There's less of a feeling that the SVG is a separate entity and more that it's just part of the page.
I did a side-by side comparison of ASV in IE and native SVG on my site. My examples are all very simple and rendered almost identically. The major exception to this is that filters are totally missing. From the Mozilla project page:
"Big areas of the SVG specification where we're still lacking include filters, svg defined fonts, and declarative animations."
It's a beta, so I don't expect it to be complete, but it brought to mind the utility of having a simple way to check which implementation of SVG is being used to render the page. For example, without knowing that animations aren't supported, the casual user will be very confused as to why an SVG-based game simply doesn't function. Right now it's not casual users who are downloading this build (the nightlies), but there will always be differences between implementations, so when the next release comes out I hope it's simple to tell how the SVG is being rendered.
It's also a good idea to pay attention to the version of the standard supported, whether it's Tiny or Full and whether it's 1.1 or 1.2 (which could come from W3C in May).
more of the same on Twitter.
VRML (3D SVG) came on the scene several years ago, but for some reason, it too fell on it's face. What is the big aversion to scaleable [e.g. useful] image formats? For crying out loud, I'd even settle for <img type="pdf"> or <img type="eps">, just to get something out there.
Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1
SVG tiny = mobile phones
:
SVG basic = PDAs
SVG = personal computers
And if you'd checked this page
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile/#sec-eleind, which is Google hit #1 for 'svg tiny', you would see the differences between SVG tiny and SVG basic in terms of supported elements, styles (further down), etc.
In addition, anywhere where SVG basic at least reads "n/a", that's a feature that should be in SVG full.
as almost always, opera had it before ;P
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
From Appendix A: SVG Requirements
[...] Paths can be made up of any combination of the following:
- Straight line segments
- Cubic bezier curved segments
- Quadratic bezier curved segments
- Elliptical and circular arcs
- No other curve types (Other curve types such as splines or nurbs are either technically very difficult, industry-specific and/or have not established themselves as industry standards as much as beziers.)
You may want to check tools like autotrace and their output if you're not entirely convincedbundaegi is good for you
To me this reminds me of the way that EMCAscript, JavaScript and JScript diverged and became a HUGE problem for webdevelopers. Same with CSS. Since all these browsers are tapping into the same resource, they need to be accessing it and processing it in the same way so that there aren't so many translations of the same thing. Next thing you know, we may just have a King James version of the Internet!
If we want to be able to put SVG all over the place in XHTML, then we should push the whole standard in that direction, not just on a per browser basis.
Whilst I always enjoy hearing good news about Firefox, I do have to wonder if part of the reason to support SVG is due to the recent acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe.
Considering that Adobe probably plans on incorporating SVG into Flash at some future point, it would make strategic sense for Firefox to take appropriate measures before that happens.
Just a thought.
But nobody cares about Opera. Firefox for life!
Ahh... but that's where things like the <switch> element, CSS, and the new <multiImage> support coming in 1.2
all come in handy. That gives you 'hinting' and/or 'level-of-detail' (LOD).So like Flash's vector images?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
When I loaded this page, Firefox uses the request header:
x t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
Will the new version prefer SVG in that accept header, or will SVG fall after png, in the q=0.5 category?
I'm askng because in certain software projects I work with, I use content negotiation to deliver the image format the user wants [PLUG: http://fdcl.sourceforge.net/] and that lets them decide if they can handle PNG or they must use the crummy gif equivalent. Firefox specifically prefers png, so that wins. I'm sure this would be the only method that SVG's are delivered to Firefox, since nobody wants to put a file onto a website that will never be seen.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
About time. I can tell you SVG adoption is some years late.
/. people claiming 'SVG is only good for banner ads and unneeded intros'.
On a side note, I can't wait for advertisers to start using SVG for banner ads, or l33t people to start using it on 'co0L 1nTr0S'. THEN I want to see
If SVG ads begin to be a problem, I think we're more likely to see the Firefox extension FlashBlock begin supporting SVG as well.
FlashBlock (formerly known as FlashClickToView) allows one to create a whitelist of flash you always want to view.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Your monitor will use pixels, but hardware accelerated SVG rendering is showing up in several places and with nVidia posting SVG-related job-offers i hope to be able to buy a video-card soon to relieve my CPU from doing the vector magic.
If you don't want pixels even in the end, maybe you should build a SVG interpreter connecting to a plotter or lasershow.
My favourite Web browser, Konqueror, has excellent SVG support. I have even many SVG wallpapers on KDE displayed in sequence every 1 min, as well as SVG system icons. And people keep asking me why I don't like Firefox!
Everyone is having orgasms over SVG static images. They're ignoring the abuse potential of dancing, blinking ads. And unlike Fuckwave-Slash, it won't be possible to "remove a plugin". If it can't be disabled via a user setting, watch for somebody to fork Firefox. Anyone remember XFree86?
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
these services might not send you SVG, but:
-they might use it on the server and rasterize as a last step before sending it of to you
-there are services that do
-most modern mobile phones can do SVG, many even do out of the box (both MMS and Vodafone Live for example use it)
Check
http://www.svg.org/ (community)
http://www.svgopen.org/ (world gathering)
http://svg.pagina.nl/ (links)
"they" haven't copywritten cake, BUT you know that song you sing when you typically have cake? Na na naa na To you, na na naaa na tooo you!...That's right, Happy Birthday is copywritten, so it's kinda funny how you used cake as an example. :)
I'm really not concered here with the reasons why.
But let me tell you what I see:
But, let's look in the other direction, Flash:
In short, I don't see a whole lot of excitement about Flash, except from one crowd: Artist and graphic designer types.
The point isn't whether my perceptions about Flash or SVG themselves are correct. The point is whether my perceptions of the communities around them are correct.
If designers and art types, and a handful of programmers are excited about Flash- okay, that's one thing.
But if most programmers and developers are excited about SVG, that's another thing entirely. Who writes the apps? Who writes the programming languages? Who writes the tools?
Devs have shown themselves not to be terribly excited about Flash. However, there's a lot of excitement around SVG.
So, you know- you put 2 and 2 together, and you come out with: SVG will be the one that busts the bubble. We won't be trapped in little boxes anymore.
Much of the software is already here. This thing has been in planning and development for years and years and yeras. So, we already have all these libraries, that are just being integrated into the respective platforms. So: We have every reason to believe this will work.
I don't know why Flash didn't work. I don't even have to know particularly why Flash didn't work. All I have to do is see is that SVG worked: It struck the chord the developers needed to play along with.
BIG in the mobile world:
about a billion handsets can support it, many do out of the box these days. Services like MMS and Vodafone use it.
seriously used on the server-side:
Pictures sent to your browser, especially those from mapservers, could well be generated in SVG on the server only to be rasterized as a last step before sending to the browser.
graphics software:
"save as SVG" all over the place
browsers: support is gaining big, though even before often people were watching SVG without knowing, cause the Adobe plug-in came along with some Acrobat Reader versions.
etc.,etc.
get your perception more in line with reality
http://svg.org/ (community)
http://www.svgopen.org/ (world event)
http://svg.pagina.nl/ (links)
Well, that and my CSS code fuggin sucks. But I highly recommend Firefox for correctly displaying Code that Fuggin Sucks (CFS) anyway.
I must have 10 bucks available on my CC, and am going to donate them NOW! SVG is the best thing on my list close to sliced bread, Dan Steinman's dynapi and Adobe's VRML impleentation a long time ago. Way cool, revolutionary thinking, the stuff geeks are made of. May the web become what it was meant to be 6 years ago!
"I don't think stuffing lots of features into firefox"
SVG is not a mere "extension": it's a vital part of the web's future user interface. It's html for the future and Firefox will have to handle it just like it does html: with a builtin renderer.
I don't feel like it...
For what it's worth, Adobe's had an SVG plugin that works nicely in Windows/IE for at least three or four years, now, so hopefully nobody will see a need to lock out IE users. My own experience with trying to run the non-Windows builds of it in Firefox on Linux or NetBSD, even recently, has been adequate at best, but having Firefox natively support SVG on a wide range of operating systems finally offers an alternative.
The down-side for Internet Explorer users, as the slashdot summary mentioned, is that the plugin architecture means any SVG still needs to be restricted within a rectangular box. This means that it can't be interspersed in the rest of the page. It still allows for SVG-supporting website admins to make their content available to IE users, though.
Without restricting sites by web browser, I hope people do start using SVG more often. The format's been standardised for years -- if we don't use it, there's less motivation for application developers to fix bugs, write efficient code, and bother properly supporting it.
Trouble is, sensing the browser's capabilities via a client-side script is a security violation, so one can't check "svg.enabled" either. However, if an svg image is not displayable, there is no error; it is just not visible. So for one extra server exchange, there could be a cover page which redirects the user to the proper version of the html data. Old-fashioned and 90's-style, but works.
At this point, the ONLY thing I care about in new firefox releases is if it fixes the memory leak that makes Firefox so appalling on my machine (and others).
I'm told it's not a very common problem, which is of course the worst kind of problem when you're one of the ones stuck with it.
My friend annoyingly succeeded in convincing me to try Firefox, he claimed I would like it better than IE, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, the bastard was right, leaving me stuck trying to use either a broken Firefox which I have to keep shutting down to release memory, or going back to IE, which I don't want to do now that I've tasted Firefox. Woe is me, etc etc. With friends like that, who needs enemies, and so on.
And how is it I've become a fanboy of a browser that gives me such grief?
Unlike proprietary Microsoft extensions, which Microsoft foists upon the world with a product release and incomplete documentation, when "we" do it, it's an open standard developed with community involvement, and everybody gets the standard at the same time.
Microsoft has had exactly the same time to implement it as every other browser vendor. In fact, they have implemented it: it's part of Avalon. The only reason it's not in IE is because Microsoft generally has dropped the ball on IE.
So, it is OK if it's us because we do it differently: we do it fairly.
See the answers to this comment, and know that thy name is Faggot.
Heya,
... rely on SVG. I believe there is a MATHML-extension for firefox and also one for chemical structures or something like that. This will also be nice to use mayeb instead of pictures of formulas, ...
I think MATHML,
I believe SVG is the answer for showing pictorial representations of dynamically generated data on the web. Pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs etc. are just way too useful. The web is still all about giving people access to information in an easy to digest format.
Of course SVG isn't all that new, but good support for it has been sorely lacking. Adobe's plugin is the best of a bad lot (ok I've only seen Corel's and IE's native support), and I can't imagine Adobe's gonna be pushing to fix up their's with the recent acquisition of Macromedia. On top of that, my Firefox doesn't seem to like the Adobe plugin much (actually crashes!).
SVG should be standard in browsers. Not having it should be like not having the ability to view jpegs. (And yes the "spamvertising" possibilities suck but at the risk of paraphrasing a certain someone, if we don't adopt SVG because of that, then the spammers have already won.)
I used Corel Draw 4.0 to create web graphics. I'd take a 4K Corel Draw vector-based image and export it to gif (there was no .jpg support in Mosaic at that time). The resulting gif was either considerably larger or considerably crappier looking than the original .cdr (I think it was .cdr back then).
.cdr files or maybe even just come out with a plugin early on they would have crushed Adobe.
:)
I always thought that of all the companies to miss the Internet boat, Corel missed it the worst. Had they just gotten Mosaic to include support for
It's about time that a vector based image was supported by a major browser. That makes so much sense... It's too bad Microslough won't support the same one. In fact I'd say this is a nail in the coffin for SVG... Microsoft will push their own version of SVG and all will be lost. Damn my daughter was right... I am in a bad mood today.
G
So, MS decides to add features to their browser that aren't specified in standards or in a non-standard way and its a cardinal sin etc. etc.
But, Firefox decides to integrate SVG into the markup (free from a plugin box/tag) and its the greatest thing in the world.
If stardardization is truly important (as many make it seem in the case of MS) than why not wait until it gets specified in a standard and then implement that standard? Seems logical.
But, alas, that's not how the world works. How the real world works, is that vendors (MS, Firefox) add features/enhamcements/changes to the markup and capabilities, and eventually it becomes a standard (or not). That is called "innovation". If all we ever did was wait for a standard first, things wouldn't progress so quickly.
Anyway, I guess my point is that it is OK for Firefox to do this kind of thin, but not MS. When MS does it, they get accused of "embrace and extinquish".
CURL
They seem to be gearing themselves towards rich clients, but once you see past that. e.g.graphics.
Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.
OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.
Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.
Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of its overwhelming installed base and consistency across multiple platforms.
The problem with SVG is that it's extremely spotty and inconsistent across the different browsers and plug-ins and cell phones that implement it. So the lowest common denominator is very very low indeed. Dynamic HTML has the same inconsistency problems but with much worse graphics, and it's that horrible inconsistency that forces cross-browser web applications to be so clumsy and hard to use -- because they must restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator. But Flash is consistent across all platforms, and it has high quality graphics.
I've written complex, rich interactive web based applications in both SVG and Laszlo, and I like them both. I've also used Microsoft's VML, which enabled animated vector graphics inline with html many years ago, and Dynamic HTML Behavior Controls, which work pretty well, but only in Explorer, so they're a dead end.
SVG is wonderful, but it's lost its steam: too little, too late. Adobe, once its main proponent, has totally forgotten about it, and they're quite unlikely to put any more effort into it, now that they've bought Macromedia. Batik development has been stalled, and it's slow because it's "100% Pure Java". SVG has some nice advantages over Flash, but it will never beat Flash's 98% penetration.
I'd love to see SVG get its shit together, but it's going to be a long time the way the companies that were once sponsoring it like Adobe, Canon and Kodak, have appearently given up and gone on to other things. I'd love for somebody to prove that I'm wrong, but Flash has kicked SVG's ass in the market.
Once there's a fast, stable, full featured, ubiquitious SVG renderer (like Firefox may someday support), it will make a lot of sense to target it with the Laszlo compiler. But SVG is a huge complex standard, and it will take a lot of work to completely implement it in Firefox.
But there's a much more interesting and efficient route than building everything including SVG and the kitchen sink into a web browser, and that's to factor out and develop a reusable open source Flash-compatible SWF player,
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Mod parent UP.
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I'll bet with this feature you can make even better popup ads which are part of the actual page (not a new window). I love javascript too. Why can't people just settle for plain text? I want to read things not have eye candy assail me.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
Actually, I still often browse with images turned off (Image-show-hide extension for Firefox). I only have 256k ADSL, and I'm usually downloading tv episodes, so I like for pages to load fast (and I hate slowing down downloads). Most sites work fine without images. Most sites have Alt text, and the few that don't I simply don't visit.
Adobe's SVG viewer supports inline SVG in Internet Explorer (but not Firefox/Mozilla). It uses the "Binary Behaviors" ActiveX plug-in interfaces. It participates in the browser page rendering process like an ordinary html element, and you can use namespaces to embed SVG elements inline with html on the web page.
That's the same way Microsoft's VML elements work, which is just another Binary Behavior plug-in bundled with the browser. Basically you make a binary ActiveX object and give it an ID, then you declare a namespace to be associated with that id, which binds all elements in that namespace to be handled by the ActiveX object. It's a generic way to extend the web browser with ActiveX controls.
Mozilla also has a plug-in interface, but it doesn't provide the kind of inline rendering features that Internet Explorer's Binary Behaviors support.
When Adobe developed their SVG plug-in, they took advantage of some of the "advanced" Mozilla plug-in interfaces, to support their JavaScript integration (not inline rendering). But between Mozilla 0.99 and Mozilla 1.0, those plug-in interfaces changed, in a way that actually broke Adobe's SVG viewer in Mozilla. After Mozilla 1.0 shipped, any page that used even the simplest standard SVG would actually crash Mozilla.
Mozilla 1.0 crashing with Adobe's SVG plug-in was the first nail in SVG's coffin, and Adobe buying Macromedia was the last.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I wrote this SVG editor in SVG back when I wanted to learn a bit more about it. It's not fully complete, but does allow you do to some interesting things: SVG Editor in SVG.
It all goes downhill from first post
"But the fact that VML did never take off is probably the best proof that SVG will not either. not even mentionning it is supported by a far less popular browser."
Well that's part. The other part is the ongoing battle between those who make an effort to create content, and those who think it shouldn't take any effort to take those results (just ask any webmaster about that). So those technologies that leave content with it's thing hanging out, will not do as well.
Are you only speaking of incomplete SVG, or actually of SVG Tiny (the first profile of SVG Mobile)? If you're meaning the latter, then it really isn't a subset of SVG, just a different flavor of it. In fact, the SVG working group is moving away from SVG Tiny being a 'subset' of SVG Full. Instead they're are moving to having SVG Tiny be the base language and SVG Full to be "extensions to [it], forming a superset". So, as long as an implementation supports SVG Tiny, it seems completely fair to say it "supports SVG." (And in that case it's also very different than MSIE and CSS)
If the SVG image is an then compliant browsers unable to display (or download) the SVG will show the contents instead. That's one of the things tested in Acid 2.
ie, you can do this...
<svg-object-here>
<png-fallback-object>
<p>There was supposed to be a map to the party here, but your browser doesn't support SVG or PNG</p>
</object>
</object>
Of course WinIE doesn't get that right - maybe they'll finally fix this in IE7, but it seems more likely that they'll smear on another layer of features "needed by enterprise" (read: asked for by consultants who don't know the difference between HTML and PowerPoint).
http://webstandards.org/act/acid2/guide.html
If you look at the license for the spec you'll see that you can only use it legally for Flash content generation, not rendering. Also, the previous specs they released have failed to include a lot of details, particularly concerning actionscript. I can't check this version, as I refuse to sign the license and have no access to a copy, but I expect the situation to be similar.
MOOX has always enabled SVG support in his builds - that was one of the things that made them so damn good! Why is this suddenly news to everyone else?
Moox's builds are here: http://moox.ws/
That was supposed to be "SVG", not "CVS". I guess that's what I get for coding and posting at the same time.
The linked article mentions that SVG support is in the latest FF 1.0 nightlies (not 1.1 as the headline states, as 1.1 hasn't been released yet...). That article was dated April 25th, though. It says you can tell that SVG support is there by the "-svg-" string in the nightly's file name. So i checked, but the current nightlies don't have that string. I checked back to previous nightlies and still couldn't find it. I finally found it in an April 27th build.
So... is this something they were experimenting with briefly and have dropped again? Is it still in there? I haven't seen any mention of this in the other comments, so i'm kinda curious...
B*B,
-Smoke.
I think SVG support will be a great addition. Rendering real-time information will be a key in the future of web browsing. I wonder if they will get into a 3D implementation ever :?) Or even a better better NFL realtime game monitor. That would rock too! he,he..
I belive it would be a good idea, and a very handy trick, for firefox to implement some sort of content controll options for SVG images. Seeing SVG is a tag/XML based format, it would be relatively simple to simply turn off annoyances like transitions and animations and the likes and only display content. Also, it would be very simple for manufactures of text-based browsers like Links and Lynx to implement an XML parser and simply extract the nessecary content out of the SVG image in the case that it was used as some lame excuse for a website.
Wouldnt it be nice if you could browse Flash based websites in text-only web interfaces? .. I personally think that would rock!.
Im personally hoping theres also some sort of style sheeting support for SVG images, either now or in the future, so the they could be inserted into your documents colour scheme. (ie: ditch using hoards of GIF images to produce those little round pieces that make your boxes rounded, and stick an SVG in its place.. bliss)
--i am a jackal-caution-i bite--
So does Firefox, Opera and even Safari despite Apple saying the latest version of Safari passes it. The version that ships with Tiger (that's where I'm typing this from) fails just as miserably as any other browser.
... because like Flash, it'll mainly be used as an ad engine and I can do without my browser making it easier to flash annoying ads at me.
*Pulls out his LART and proceeds to beat the AC senseless*
Ummm...sorry...just venting my anger at Macromedia for not making a version of flash that I can use...instead, I'm supposed to compile a 32-bit version of Firefox in a chroot and install flash in there.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
When will we see mainline browser support of this?
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/
Some of the demos I have seen are really cool!
Having fully integrated SVG will be great. I've been a big fan since I set up our company's interactive charting systems using Object Oriented Javascript and SVG back in 2001.
Everyone keeps going on about how great SVG is, and,you know, if it wasn't a pain in the rear, maybe it would be more adopted by now. For graphics, most people are going to wind up using either Flash or whatever MS sneaks into IE8 as part of Longhorn.
This is my sig.
Well,
no offense surely there are a lot of people who like SVG. If you are one of the ppl who say: XML (and thus SVG also) is ment only to be generated and processed by a programs, then fine.
However I think XML is usefull to be able as a human to read/debug documents, and for easy exploration you should also be able to write simple stuff. XHTML proves that people want to do the later, while XMI shows that you probably need to stick to the former.
The point of critics about SVG is: how braindead can a XML dialect designer (or in this a graphics description language designer) be to distinguish absolute and relative coordinates by upper or lower case capitalization of single letters, namely x and y?
This is a prime example where an attribute would be more usefull.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There is, no doubt, information, that is best presented using SVG, but -- with even less doubt -- the feature will be abused to create even more pages, that are readable only on the web-author's desktop.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wow. This is a pretty interesting idea and could turn out to be an interesting marketing ploy.
I am barely a graphic designer, but I am very curious about the ability to mix vector graphics directly into html. The potential sounds amazing. Can anyone shed any light on what the implementation of such a website would be like?
Also, I wonder if this is at all likely to be considered for the upcoming IE 7 update.
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
nm...answered below. I should RTFT first :-)
I am sure you are wrong about SVG. The main thing ten years ago was being able to read the HTML source by just right-clicking in the browser and learn how this or that effect was achieved. You can't do that with Flash, but you can with SVG. If the SVG-file is very large, it is possible to use the ZIP-archive strategy of OpenOffice to schrink it.
My prediction is that enabling web designers of any level or piggy bank to learn from each other will make SVG the primary vector graphics format on the web in no time.
The none-professional designers will probably start by just exporting illustrations and maps, using the GIMP, Inkscape or Sodipodi, then add a bit of interaction and eventually the Flash-elite the will get the message and contribute with their expertise.
I think SVG is to vector graphics as MySQL was to relational databases - you put into the hands of everyone and watch them take it places you've never dreamed of.
...or they could stop writing code the Microsoft way, skip the "pretty" things and actually fix the gaping security holes found here.
I'll be happy when this chart goes away.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!