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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?"
Take a look at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/About.html for more information on SVG.
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. JPEG is a bitmap based format, storing the position and colour of pixels, a vector format on the other hand stores information in terms of lines, curves, surfaces, etc. so is scalable whilst retaining quality.
inskcape, sodipodi. two very wonderful examples of open source producing very useful tools.
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i use both, personally. SVG has been a primary format target for me as a programmer for a couple years now
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They're not really in a position to be better than a JPG, in the cases where a JPG would be used to display an images with thousdands or millions of colours.
On the other hand, SVG offers an easier (or what seems should be easier) method of dynamically-generating images like charts and graphs. Combined with some javascript (think XMLHttpRequest), you can change and interact with these graphs in realtime. Along with vector graphic's "infinite" resolution you've got a lot of powerful options for graphing alone.
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---Why its better than JPEG?
Well, they're both good for different things.
JPEGS are simple raster images. A jpeg and a bitmap are one in the same (with jpeg having good compression). Simply, it comes down to this bit is this color, this bit is this color, and this bit is this color. If you magnify raster images, you end up with blurred and horribly pixellated images that have almost no resemblance of the original.
A SVG (and similar technologies) uses vector graphics. The best way to explain this is thus: Graph a line Y=X on a xy coordinate plane. You end up with a 45 degreee angle. Now, if you were to view a portion between 0 and 10^-100(X) and 0 to 10^-100(y) it's still going to be a line. It's not going to be a stairstep pixelated crap.
Probably the best usage of SVG's would be simple images made for dramatically inbcreasing size (like icons in KDE) or other size-variation.
The only way to do pretty increasing size icons now are to shim a javascript to display 6 or so jpegs that were manually sized. These do not account for resolution on your screen.
Hopefully, Ive made clear what these things are.
http://www.inkscape.org/
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Adobe Illustrator
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They'll only hit the back button if they can tell the page is obviously borked. If the webmister has done his/her/its work properly, the page will degrade to a level that IE can handle, without becoming craptastic.
Ex: Implement SVG as a bandwidth savings measure, then keep static PNG/GIF images around for when IE shows up. That's why the webserver is told which browser is visiting, IIRC.
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Verify you got something like kdegraphichs-ksvg installed. And make sure in settings->configure Konqueror the file association for svg are set to embedding in ksvgplugin.
Picking on the wrong people. Unlike Flash, SVG isn't some binary kludge. Which means that by using CSS properly, the browser will actually be able to render non-SVG alternatives with little trouble (not even lame javascript browser/plugin detectors).
Look at Greasemonkey, You can do this today in FF
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There already is one. XAML iirc. XAML is expected to be an important part of Avalon. I haven't read that much on it, but with buzz around Avalon lately, maybe XAML gets split out and promoted separately as well. That would lead to more fragmentation in what appears to be a market being choked by alternatives.
more of the same on Twitter.
SodiPodi is a native SVG editor. ImageMagick and the Gimp also have some SVG support.
more of the same on Twitter.
SVG-enabled builds of Mozilla have been available for about 4 years.
The reason for the excitement (and SVG soon to be switched on by default in FireFox) is a new SVG backend which is supposedly much better, although the old one always worked just fine for me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Probably the best usage of SVG's would be simple images made for dramatically inbcreasing size (like icons in KDE) or other size-variation.
The best use of SVG would actually be structured graphics, something not possible with any of the current bitmap formats. You could have some parts of your drawing scale independently of others. Or style your drawing based on CSS so it picks up the site theme. You could have dynamically updating statistics that let you actually select percentages because the percentages are text fields. There are many, many very useful things you can do with structured graphics that are clumsy and complicated to do right now. And don't forget, SVG lets you use bitmap images too (using the "image" element), so you can easily cobble together a structured drawing that's bitmap based using SVG as well.
Case in point, at work I'm currently building a web-based floorplan viewer that can highlight various surfaces and floorplan items based on UI events, and give information about them. I ended up designing it so the floorplans get generated into SVG server-side, with the structure embedded using "g" group elements with various classes indicating the sort of element they are, and an actionscript importer/renderer in flash that deals intelligently with that content (so you can select a desk and instantly see which employee sits at it, for example). Ofcourse, I had to write my own SVG class, so the time invested isn't worth it for most situations. But if there was good support in the browser for dealing with SVG files in an intelligent and dynamic way without having to write a ton of code in something like flash, it would produce a waterfall of new and innovative web apps.
Dynamically increasing icons are nice eye candy, but they are not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what would become possible if SVG had decent support in the browser.
What would make a huge difference in the adoption of SVG would be if adobe post-acquisition makes the flash team incorporate native SVG support in flash
Yes, but that would be SVG is name only, and it wouldn't do anything that Flash can't already do... The whole point of SVG support is that it comes out of the bounding box and into the CSS/HTML/Javascript.
since SVG is XML-based and XHTML provides a way to include any other XML-conformant language in a special element, yes, this is standard and any XHTML compliant browser that doesn't do SVG will simply ignore it...
Actually, that list is fairly out of date. The last content dates are from 2002, and there's no mention yet of Inkscape, that came on the scene over a year and a half ago.
The only thing left to wonder is will it take 2 or 20 years?
SVGT [SVG-Tiny] does not support scripting. SVGB [SVG-Basic] allows optional support of scripting, and includes all of the language features from SVG 1.1 to support scripting.
Both SVGB and SVGT support the full set of SVG 1.1's declarative animation features:
The language features to support animation through scripting and DOM are available in SVGB. SVGT only supports declarative animation.
SVGB and SVGT allow implicit targeting of parent elements, and targeting elements using the 'xlink:href' attribute.
SVGB and SVGT support linear, spline, paced and discrete animations.
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.
Do you ever use Firefox? Have you ever had the left hand side bar overlap the comments and article?
as almost always, opera had it before ;P
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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
DBDesigner4 is opensource and does arbitrary scaling just fine...
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CTRL+plus, CTRL+minus (increase font size, decrease font size) corrects the glitch without reloading and, unlike reloading, every time.
Have you ever looked at maps24.com? I find that to be the most technically impressive (and supports the most countries) map service that I've seen so far, but also, less reliable.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Hard to say. The discussion around bug #240493 makes it sound like image/svg+xml (the MIME type for SVG) might not even be in the Accept Header. To me that sounds very very odd. It also makes it impossible to decide simply based on the accept header whether or not to serve SVG. This means client side scripts (to detect support) and another trip to the server (to get the appropriate file).
more of the same on Twitter.
Usefully, with the <object> tag, you can specify alternative objects to render. So you can provide a SVG, and a PNG to render instead, then a GIF to render instead, then a plaintext alternative.
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 article submitter borked it up, because SVG is not a Firefox-only feature: it will also be present in all the other Gecko browsers, it's already (partially) supported in Opera, and if it's not in KHTML already then it will be soon - which will bring in just about every other Linux and Mac user. The only browser with no plans for native SVG support is - you guessed - Internet Explorer.
Why the fuck should I, as a web designer, let Microsoft dictate what features I use?
SVG could become the Ogg Vorblis of graphic formats. It's out there, but arrived too late and no one much cares.
It took MP3 a decade to catch on, with no competition; Ogg Vorbis has pretty good commercial support already after much less time. I wouldn't view it as a failure.
SVG actually has a better chance: it fulfills a real need that none of the existing alternatives (including Flash) address.
I've heard from numerous sources that the memory leaks (there's not just one, apparently) have been greatly ameliorated (if not outright fixed) in the developmental versions, and that we'll be seeing these in the 1.1 release.
http://dmoz.org/Bookmarks/P/pollei/Maps_and_Geogra phy/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qpegps/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualhiker/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/roadnav/
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