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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!
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?
...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
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.
Its failure to take off prolly has nothing to do with the ubiquitious support for Flash..
a lableVectorGraphics/default.aspx
Fair point, however I'd say that no, Flash hasn't supplanted the role that SVG could perform, and there still is a huge void waiting to be filled.
The reality is that the web is largely full of static, raster graphics (most graphs, as a simple example, exist as tiny craptacularly printing, non-interactive GIFs) - most of which would be better served by interactive, "infinite resolution" vector graphics.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/07/Sc
"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 hope that they choose features carefully and don't start bloating firefox.
I'm all for there being a library of extentions we can add into firefox if we wish to.
I don't think stuffing lots of features into firefox is what would make IE users switch.
I used to use Corel and WordPerfect Presentations, which has a propriety vector graphics format, WPG.
I don't think Flash's existence has anything to do with the non-existance of SVG content. I think the lack of content comes from the lack of viewing methods.
SVG is not just another vector-based image format, it is scriptable, patent-free, open source, and now built into Firefox. Yes, I know Flash is scriptable too...
with XMLHttp, SVG, and the latest nightlies of Firefox, I've been able to create dashboard programs very easily, with "guages", "warning lights", and all the stuff that my management wants to see in a simple easy to understand manner, all with open source software, and a little effort on my part.
It won't be that easy to get it implemented at my employer, but I was able to do it all in a couple hours without Flash.
I'm happy for Flash and SVG to coexist. I'm sure that they can live happily together.
"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.
I dunno; if this thing works without crashing my browser, hogging 100% of the system's CPU, or blasting irritating sounds (and if it's used for useful content and presentation instead of lame menus or "flash-only" styled pages), it might just take off.
Flash is disabled on this machine because it does exactly one of two things in a web page: 1) show an ad, or 2) replaces perfectly servicable text (or even image-based) links in menus and navigation widgets that just ends up slowing everything down. I've already loaded the page. I shouldn't have to wait for the menus to load, too, just so your cute logo can flicker or rotate or so your menus can do impressive, flashy transitions that slow things down even more.
Read my stuff.
Its failure to take off prolly has nothing to do with the ubiquitious support for Flash...
Considering it was only made a standard in 2001, things are only going slightly slower than CSS and HTML. The real problem is that SVG is hard to implement. I don't disagree that the availability of Flash has lowered the priority, but as far as open-source implementations are concerned, I thnk it was destined to take a while.
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.
> 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
Fair point, however I'd say that no, Flash hasn't supplanted the role that SVG could perform, and there still is a huge void waiting to be filled.
I think his point was more along the lines that Flash lowered the incentive for anyone to rush to market with a really good SVG implementation.
Of course you are correct that full SVG support would be a really good thing for the web. I would go so far as to say it's the most significant advancement of design possibilities since the introduction of the TABLE element.
Opera 8 already supports native SVG. Firefox is lagging behind yet again.
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).
News for you; nothing is a "reliable source" such that it shouldn't be questioned. Wikipedia provides the best starting point for research on the web.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
This integrated-SVG is planned for FireFox 1.1 and already available in Opera 8.
Closed-source software rules, at least sometimes :-)
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.
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 !
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...
What's ironic is that I rarely seen Flash sites which do functional things like preload in the background or *simplify* the content. The loading animation, for example, is usually a show-off piece that the user is supposed to gawk at.
Graphic artists != UI designers
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.
SVG's failure to take off has everything to do with there not being any infinitely scalable vector-based pr0n. Pr0n is what drives internet technology.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
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
Flash is disabled on this machine because it does exactly one of two things in a web page: 1) show an ad, or 2) replaces perfectly servicable text (or even image-based) links in menus and navigation widgets that just ends up slowing everything down. I've already loaded the page. I shouldn't have to wait for the menus to load, too, just so your cute logo can flicker or rotate or so your menus can do impressive, flashy transitions that slow things down even more.
If you change "Flash" for "images" and go back 10 years in time, you'd get the exact same situation that images in HTML had to go through.
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
Won't it be regarded as an embrace-or-extend move by Mozilla?
Maybe. If the Mozilla foundation were a gigantic monopoly which seeked to break standards specifically for the purpose of creating compatibility problems with competing browsers in favor of their own proprietary alternative.
Wait. They're not a monopoly. They're implementing a standard and not breaking one. They're doing nothing proprietary.
Remember, it was Microsoft that coined the term "embrace and extend." Changes are not bad in and of themselves, but web browsers need to be interoperable and standards-compliant, so different browsers will render the same thing the same way. Copying IE's rendering to display those pages that are designed around IE is compatible with IE, but IE alone, and ultimately just gives Microsoft carte blanche to dictate the development of HTML. The Mozilla guys are doing it the right way here.
What happens when you want to watch some flash cartoons?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Wrong, at least as supported formats are concerned the more Firefox can display and render, the better.
Because that's a real "killer"-feature in the pure sense of the word. If you have a majority of Firefox users on your website (and many websites already have, for example heise.de or arstechnica.com, probably slashdot too) you can put some Firefox-only goodies online (like SVG or transparent PNGs, etc.)
And that will cause the remaining IE-users to switch.
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.
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'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.
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
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
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.