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Apple to Adopt KDE4's KDOM and KSVG2?
Anonymous Coward writes "According to Eric Seidel, Apple WebCore developer, Safari may soon have 'experimental SVG support.' He ported KDE's new DOM architecture KDOM as well as their Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation KSVG2 and render tree library KCanvas to WebCore. A new section devoted to SVG is also up on the WebCore site. Does this all mean that SVG will now go mainstream, finally?"
On thefacebook.com, "visualize my friends" creates an svg file that shows all the connections between your friends, and Safari displays it just fine.
Safari doesn't support it natively.
The news is ofcourse great. The quality
of the news item is not. The correct KDOM
link is:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdenonbeta/kdom/
Also Eric is *not* part of the Safari team,
though he works with them often.
Cheers,
Rob.
If you have the Adobe SVG plugin it does. But not by itself. Try ctrl-clicking on the SVG graphic and select "About SVG viewer", voilá!
Apple adding native support would mean that there would be a userbase with SVG support by default, as with good PNG transparency support and CSS text shadows where Apple has paved the way.
Seems like these days you just can't ask people to download appropriate plugins anymore. Oh how I miss the roarin' nineties...
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
> I think SVG headed for historical footnote status
> in the very near future.
I am inclined to think not. Many of the better diagramming and modeling tools out there now support it. Even Visio exports to SVG. (Yes, it's a typical-of-Microsoft, b0rked-with-binary-crap version of SVG, but it's there.)
There are lots of other places to use SVG besides on the Web.
As for Adobe, I think the point of the article is that their plugin (which works fine for MSIE) is becoming increasingly irrelevant in any case. Especially if Mozilla can be persuaded to enable by default the SVG support in Gecko that's been around for ages.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
... I tought that the K in KSVG2 was from KDE, and KDE comes with Linux, BSD and many other Unices (http://www.kde.org/download/distributions.php).
Then I thought that the Adobe SVG Viewer is available for Windows platforms for a couple of years now - and while you consider it awful, it is the most compliant SVG viewer I have ever tried.
Then there is Firefox 1.1 and the beautiful (because of JavaScript) support for SVG in Dear Park Alpha.
So no, SVG was probably not "first addopted" by Apple, but yes the addoption of SVG by Apple will certainly help SVG go mainstream. However, not as much as Adobe did, nor as Firefox will.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Eric Seidel is not an Apple WebCore engineer. From TFM:
Disclaimer: Let me emphasize that at this time there is NO SVG
support in Safari itself, nor has Apple (or myself) made any
commitment to ship SVG support in Safari, now or in the future.
However, with your help (the open source community) I would very much
like to see full SVG integration in WebKit in the future.
This means that there is experimental support in WebCore, and experimental support may be in WebKit in the future, should you want to roll your own. I wouldn't expect Apple to ship anything "experimental" in Safari, though.