Slashdot Mirror
Kurt Cagle's OpenSVG Keynote
Metaphorically writes "Kurt Cagle has posted a summary of his keynote speech from the SVG Open 2005. Inspiring for an SVG enthusiast, informative for any geek. He covers a lot of ground on XML and the next generation of GUI. It connects a lot of technologies that people might otherwise not totally grasp. If you haven't been following the development of XForms, E4X, SVG and XAML then this is a great way to catch up."
Kevin Clarke writes about his thoughts on Evolgrafix' Renesis presentation here
Something Witty Goes Here
SVG, et al. are a Flash killer.
Discuss.
The site got raped. Mirror?
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<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<plan>
<step>Learn XML</step>
<step>Give keynote speech about XML subset</step>
<step>Profit!</step>
</plan>
Here's the Google cache.
/. realy out did itself. dead link already.
i'm really tempted to read the article and it isn't available.
www.understandingxmlandtheslashdoteffect.com
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
What is this new technology and why should I care about it? The article link does not work, Slashdot effect.
As a computer expert of 20 years and programmer of 15 years, how will this effect me? Will I have to learn totally new things, or does it build on the old ones? Who owns the patents to this new technology? Will Microsoft release their own version of it and crush everyone?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
MirrorDot of the Keynote
just found this: http://www.hauser-wenz.de/s9y/index.php?/archives/ 116-SVG-Open-2005.html
There's a blog post here with a link to another presentation from the conference.
link
I was really hoping to read this article and read the hype about xml in plain english.
Looks like I'll have to wait a bit longer.
http://mirrordot.org/stories/15f5aa5bf188471e829b9 c28c7f8cccd/index.html
yay for mirrors!
fix the typo of programming to programmer... and here is a nice link to show an example of its power..
yosemite (plugin required. i think its built into IE though)
is so old fashioned.
Anybody got a podcasts of this?
(err...wait, this is slashdot....)
Anybody get a torret of this?
(err...wait, this is slashdot....)
Where's the torret?!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Practical application:
when (ahem) "someone I know" wanted to make themself a firefox tshirt (ahem) *they* found themself a copy of the logo in svg, scaled it up to a nice tasty tshirty size, printed it out on iron on transfer paper and poof! beautiful tshirt - thanks to svg.
Ahhh I love a happy ending.
and yes, useless w/o pics. Sorry.
Now I like SVG, but this is like having the Microsoft PDC talk about the future of Windows... its hardly a balanced view on the future. Its like a Windows v Linux review funded by Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong its interesting stuff... but in general the view here is from the position of SVG being the only answer, and that is currently far from being a certainty.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
1. Postscript is not as open a license as svg.
2. I believe there's still a postscript tax for printers that really render postscript. (as opposed to emulation) I know I would like to see that go away. SVG is the way to make Postscript go away.
3. Imagine a desktop/web page that renders itself by percentages. You could effectively write one thing that renders very well on a desktop, PDA, phone, or other mobile devices.
There are other reasons, but this technology matters a whole lot when it comes to making a pretty OSS/DTP/Web environment.
That IE currently doesn't render SVG's and Adobe doesn't promote it should be a clue that both companies would rather keep profiting from their proprietary ways.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.
Even if it is somewhat slow and clunky, at least it shows that it is possible to do.
At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.
Apps like Inkscape are probably the most advanced SVG showcases, but for some reason everybody wants to write their own browser plugin from scratch instead of starting from the authoring tools and extending them to support a 'playback' mode.
Has nobody noticed Flash and what made it so popular?
You can publish standards till the cows come home but the only way anything becomes popular is by being useful.
A reference implementation of a standard is immediately useful, both to users and to developers. Why isn't it there, and if the answer is 'it's too much work' then maybe, just maybe, the overcomplexity of the standard is the problem.
Standards are a good thing, but standards must be both implementable, and accompanied by an implementation, unless they want to float in limbo for years like SVG.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I had some data, I wanted to lay it out graphically, a little perl script to transform it and *poof!* there it was!
Although, batik is a little bit slow. Hmpf. The Adobe plugin is nice though.
Start Running Better Polls
Since the website is slashdotted, here is the cached link ;) http://www.understandingxml.com.nyud.net:8090/arch ives/2005/08/the_future_of_s.html
I'm not usually one to complain about sentence structure, but this is just silly:
<quote>
Inspiring for an SVG enthusiast, informative for any geek.
</quote>
The OpenSVG talks are being streamed live over the MBONE. How come the MBONE is still experimental? How come it hasn't been replaced by a standard tech in all routers? Does IPv6 do multicast? The version being rolled out in some routers today?
--
make install -not war
I'm waiting for the day that I don't have to mockup pages in SVG using Inkscape, exporting it to the Gimp for slicing, then wrapping css around the slices. I want to be able to go straight from mockup in SVG to final design in SVG.
"Please put your right hand down your pants and try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator."
Well, putting your other hand in his pants will not solve the problem. So stop asking!
> It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.
XForms had as exit criteria for becoming a recommendation one complete and two interoperable implementations . One of the complete implementations that served to meet this goal was X-Smiles, a GPL implementation of XForms (and co-indcidentally SVG, XHTML 1.0, CSS of various levels, SMIL, etc.).
The Mozilla XForms project also aims to provide a complete XForms 1.0 implementation under the Mozilla license, and it's quite far along, and is included as an XPI with each nightly build. The last Linux build I looked at was a 141KB, and about 200KB for Windows, and is a single-click install, just like the bugreport tool.
>>> "AFAIK, Microsoft is mostly ignoring it."
....
Well you clearly haven't come across the beta for Acrylic - http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/ - which merges vector graphics (SVG, yee-haw) and raster.
I use Inkscape still as my download of Acrylic didn't even get past the install stage (I'm using Inkscape on Slack and WinXP - if you haven't got the latest install get it now, it's awesome). I've read good things about Acrylic(some whilst stood in my local news agents!).
I'd be prepared to bet that the SVG files produced aren't vanilla
Here is my open source solution of next generation GUI: http://opentheme.sourceforge.net/OpenThemeTutorial .html
Sorry, Mozilla XForms Project.
What is so cool about SVG is talked about in this keynote. SVG, is vector graphics AND text, AND placed raster images, AND animation described in an open, easy to read format.
One advantage is that you can design a webpage the same way you design a printed piece. Where you have just as much control over it. MS explorer requires an adobe plugin to display it, similarly to how it displays flash. Firefox is going to display SVG natively in the 1.1 browser (actually already does with the deerpark alphas.
The code is easily visible like HTML. The desktops that use SVG for the gui, I don't know much about, but it's fantastic. Nice icons, or buttons or any visual element that is smaller in file size, breaks out of the square we are used to, and the elements can be enlarged or reduced and still be rendered beautifully.
check out inkscape if you want to experiment with svg, or the open clipart library to see some cool examples. of SVG.
http://inkscape.org/
http://openclipart.org/
Here's what mozilla is doing with SVG:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
``At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.''
You're damn right. The technicall term for this is Design by Comittee. Get a bunch of people together and design the Great Solution that is going to solve everybody's needs. What you get is something so monstrous and full of inconsistencies that it will take a long time until a decent portion of it has been implemented, if such a thing happens at all. Ada and C++ are examples of this from programming languages.
The other approach is to first let the world sort out what features are actually desirable, then standardize what's there and try to get implementers to converge towards the standard. It may take arbitrarily long before decent interoperability between implementations is achieved, but AFAIK this approach generally leads to better results. This is the approach the W3C has traditionally followed for HTML. Freedesktop.org is running a similar standardization effort for features found in KDE and GNOME. Common Lisp is an example of this from programming languages.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I am sorry, but it does not seem that the presenters know what they are talking about. .NET and thus Windows :)
Xaml is NOT the same as XUL. It is Microsoft trying to keep everyone using
Also XaMLaN is the exact opposite of true Xaml - it converts C# code to FLASH.
I have programmed in XAML for months, and it really is just another abstraction layer - sort of a way to build applications like a Web AND like a rich GUI
You can do this today with some free frameworks out there - this just has a standard method for managing state and page history for Windows Apps, and also allows more responsive web apps.
Microsoft is also trying to add AJAX for the nice JavaScript drive apps, but it probably will not ship with the Vista.
Mind you - I would still have love to go and see this conference...... To meet the presenters, not to partake of any extra curricular activities in the Netherlands.
Free as in FreeDom
Mod parent up!
You can publish standards till the cows come home but the only way anything becomes popular is by being useful.
I call this principle "working is better than right." No matter how much better your proposed correct/standard solution would be, something hacked-up that works well enough now is better.
Apparently it has pretty much everything in it. Java though, so it's not for the extreme performance peopel.
At this point, it is such a monumental task to implement all the intricacies of the full SVG specs that *nobody* - Not Microsoft,Adobe,Apache, Sun,Apple of anyone in the open source arena is able to do it, or even come close, it seems.
u s/matrix.html
Complete implementation? No. But pretty much every feature has been implemented and tested in some implementation as of the end of last year:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20030813/stat
Apps like Inkscape are probably the most advanced SVG showcases, but for some reason everybody wants to write their own browser plugin from scratch instead of starting from the authoring tools and extending them to support a 'playback' mode.
Not to knock the great work Inkscape has done, but it's not the most advanced. I would guess Adobe SVG Viewer is better as a viewer. It's definitely been around longer.
Having a reference implementation from the W3C would be great, sure, but it's not essential. Look at CSS. There are plenty of subtle bugs out there, and everybody loves to rail on the most popular browser not supporting important parts of the spec, but nobody would deny that CSS is useful.
more of the same on Twitter.
Shame that my Firefox 1.06 fails to displau it.
[Looks for clues]
$ GET -UuSsed http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg
GET http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg
User-Agent: lwp-request/2.06
GET http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/slashdot.svg --> 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 06:53:03 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "76dc6-cb7-f7f7ed00"
Server: Apache/2.0.53 (Fedora)
Content-Length: 3255
Content-Type: text/xml
Last-Modified: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 03:40:04 GMT
Client-Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 06:53:57 GMT
Client-Peer: 24.61.76.204:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Hmmm... bad Content-Type possibly?
This is where IE does what IMHO is a good job of double guessing the content type based on the file extension and "upgrades" the content type.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
This is insightful? Nobody has ever made a full implementation of CSS2, and it's very popular. And the word "standard" doesn't come from the W3C - Their finished documents are called "recommendations".
IMNSHO: SVG will become popular because it can be used to make tiny, scalable, non-blocky-printable images, which will be popular with the average joes on modem/ISDN, shortsighted and blind people, and graphical design companies, respectively and not exclusively.
I really don't get it. How will an XForms implementation help SVG? Parent was complaining about the lack of complete SVG viewers.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Complete implementation? No. But pretty much every feature has been implemented and tested in some implementation as of the end of last year
The page was last updated on 2003/08/12 18:41:23, so it was published two years from now. The problem is that every feature has been implemented and tested in a different implementation. It would be really helpful to have complete implementation(s).
Not to knock the great work Inkscape has done, but it's not the most advanced. I would guess Adobe SVG Viewer is better as a viewer. It's definitely been around longer.
I agree, the Adobe SVG Viewer is the most advanced SVG viewer at this time. A pitty that Adobe bought Macromedia though. The SVG support in Dear Park Alpha is very promissing though, and so is the upcoming Renesis engine.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Don't, don't, don't follow Common LISP as an example. Common LISP has been a disaster. There are far fewer people earning their living from LISP now than there were before Common LISP standard was introduced, and far fewer programs in regular use written in LISP.
Common LISP is a very bad standard. As Scott Fahlman wrote:
He should know. As he says on his home page:
Common LISP essentially destroyed LISP as a usable, productive language. It made an incredible number of simply wrong technical decisions; and too many of those decisions were made by the smaller companies of the eastern United States - Symbolics, LMI, Franz - trying to write a standard which was as different as possible from InterLISP, in order to kill competition from Xerox. I'm not pretending InterLISP was brilliant or the answer to all problems. It wasn't. Like Common LISP, it was a LISP2, making an artificial distinction between data and code; and it was in many ways clumsy and unorthogonal itself. But there was a great deal of creativity coming out of the InterLISP community, which Common LISP effectively killed.
We would have been so much better with a standard based on Portable Standard Lisp, or on EuLisp, or on Scheme. We would have been so much better with no standard at all. Instead, we got a LISP2 with a bizarrely complex lambda-list syntax, with a comment syntax which was incompatible with the LISP reader (so that in-core editing and development were effectively impossible), with so many horrible design errors.
Of course, it succeeded in its primary goal. Xerox was driven out of the LISP marketplace. But the cost for LISP has been horrendous: the language has been effectively destroyed. And for what was and should be the queen of programing languages, that's a disaster.
Oh, yes - I was during the eighties a very junior member of the British Standards Institution's LISP working group. I was there. I still think LISP is the best possible programming language, but these days I use Java.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
CSS2 sure isn't as popular as it could be - Half the web designers I know still only trust HTML TABLEs for their layout, and while they grudgingly use CSS font specs because the '' solution is just so unwieldy, CSS2's advanced features are ignored because of compatibilty concerns (and when they are used, they are usually the source of compatibility problems).
Personally I don't regard the current state of the CSS2 support in browsers as 'good' - CSS2 is another great example of a standard that is too difficult and open-ended to write a real-word application around, and whos more esoteric features are so useless to the majority of browser users that nobody gives a crap about making them available.. MS refuses to implement this 'standard', Mozilla and Apple struggle to pass even the ACID2 test (which is by no means exhaustive). I'm not even sure anyone has a complete CSS1 implementation at this point(Please feel free to correct me if this is not the case).
CSS2 isn't popular - browser-specific implementations of half-assed CSS2 are popular.
Because theres no alternative in the form of a reference implementation to use, or test against, or to use as a model to design APIs and applications.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Nobody has ever made a full implementation of CSS2, and it's very popular.
This is a very different story. CSS had to compete with unstructured HTML code full of font and color tags, and it was clearly a technically better solution (although complex). Everybody is using CSS because it is the only way to separate the content of a web page, from its presentation. And because CSS is extremely popular CSS2 has a clear road ahead.
The situation of SVG is very different. Macromedia Flash is already a very mature platform that already almost everything that SVG does now years ago and it did this in a very coherent way (they don't have to worry too much about interoperability). The Flash Player is installed on almost every networked computer, and it works the same everywhere. If SVG wants to have the smallest chance of replacing Flash it will have to match this. So full implementations of the SVG standard are not just nice extras, they are mandatory for the success of SVG.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
What a coincidence - Most web designers* I know haven't a clue how CSS should be used in real world situations today. Check out e.g. Designing with web standards by Jeffrey Zeldman - IIRC, he argues that as long as CSS support is as broken as it is today, the transitional approach of tables for layout and CSS for other styles is perfectly justifiable for businesses which do not care about SEO and blind people.
Also, there are plenty of examples(1, 2, 3) of how to make a table-free site look just as good as one with tables.
*These are not primarily web designers, but creators of data-driven web interfaces who use e.g.
for empty TDs.So why did some moderator think that firefox support of SVG was off-topic?
Maybe because I was dissing the webserver?
Or maybe they thought I was dissing firefox?
Or maybe I'm just paranoid?
I've seen off-topic, I've been off-topic, but that wasn't it.
THIS one is off topic, though, feel free to mod it down.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
To rephrase:
This is a very similar story. SVG has to compete with semantically void images, and it was clearly a technically better solution (although complex if written by hand). Everybody will be using SVG because it is the only way to separate the content of images from their presentation, and to make them properly scalable.
The situation of CSS was very similar. (Presentational) HTML was already a very mature platform which did almost everything that CSS does now years ago and it did this in a very coherent way (they didn't have to worry too much about interoperability). HTML browsers were installed on virtually every networked computer, and it worked the same everywhere. If CSS wanted to have the smallest chance of replacing presentational HTML it would have to match this (it did). So full implementations of the CSS standard are not just nice extras, they are mandatory for the success of CSS (no, they aren't).
If SVG was released when CSS was (i.e. ten years ago), maybe your argument would have made sense. You say that "SVG is the only way to separate the content of images from their presentation, and to make them properly scalable" and you are wrong. Flash has allowed this for many years now. No, it is not a standard, but it seems that nobody other than you and me cares about it. And, well ... why should they?
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Have you ever tried viewing the source of a Flash file? That should give an indication of how easy it is to use a piece of it inside another file, or how easy a screen reader or non-textual browser would display the contents. SVG with XHTML embedded can easily be stripped down to just the contents.
SVG has to compete with semantically void images.
... we went through those pains, and probably will do so even more in the future. But we are doing this only with the hope that, one day, people will also be able to easily use our applications.
No. SVG has to compete with Flash. And the widespread adoption of Flash by both the commercial and open source (e.g., OSFlash, OpenLaszlo etc.) communities was caused by the fact that Flash is a good platform to develop for, and has a consistent and ubiqutous Flash Player. It has nothing to do with semantics (and it never will) or scaling or anything else. No sane company would target a platform that doesn't even have good viewer. Very few developers will go through the pains of building a serious SVG application if nobody can use it.
Well
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Have you ever tried viewing the source of a Flash file?
Yes I did, and I also do know the advantages and disadvantages of both Flash and SVG. Nobody in this conversation tried to deny the technical merits of SVG. But for one technology to achieve widespread use, technical merit is never enough.
Yes, I like SVG too, and I would love to see more people using it. But this doesn't mean I will go blind and not notice its tiny market share or its very slow adoption rate. And these problems are very much agravated by the lack of complete viewers. You know, designing a complex XML vocabulary like SVG is much simpler than building the tools to actually use it.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
You don't think Flash and SVG can live side by side? For me personally, the prospect of SVG in the near future lies in non-animated interfaces - Application skins (go from bulky Media Player to slick Winamp with two clicks), faster loading of graphics-heavy web pages, building on previous work easily by checking the source of pages, getting away from non-XML syntax for advanced styling (CSS), and such.
The chicken-and-egg problem of getting a large enough user base to get application support exists for all new standards, proprietary or not. But according to TFA: All browsers will support SVG import by 2008, with most (IE being the exception, except with a plugin) by 2006.
You don't think Flash and SVG can live side by side?
Well, on way or the other they will have to live side by side. The question is whether their marketshares will become somehow comparable or not. Actually, nobody will complain for having Flash support in her/his browser, as long as there is also SVG support. And Opera and Firefox will hopefully have built-in SVG support soon enough.
For me personally, the prospect of SVG in the near future lies in non-animated interfaces - Application skins (go from bulky Media Player to slick Winamp with two clicks), faster loading of graphics-heavy web pages, building on previous work easily by checking the source of pages, getting away from non-XML syntax for advanced styling (CSS), and such.
None of these applications will be easy (or even possible) to use without a good SVG viewer.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
PERL
LISP suffers from one major drawback, readability. If LISP could be re-syntaxed so that the functions were understandable, intuitively, then Process and Control applications would benefit greatly. For example:
car becomes firstOf
cdr becomes restOf
At this point, then introduction of other cultural languages sustitution could be applied.
>Parent was complaining about the lack of complete SVG viewers.
The parent posting suggested that W3C drafts should have implementations before advancing to recommendation status; I was pointing out that that's already been done, and XForms was listed in the article, so it's not completely OT.
OK. Only a little OT :)
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
At SVG Open 2005, there was a rather cynical and quite entertaining presentation on XAML by these guys: http://www.hauser-wenz.de/s9y/index.php?/archives/ 116-SVG-Open-2005.html
CSS 2.1 says that there must be a two interoperable implementations for each feature for the specification to become a recommendation. This is so that the specification can be changed if it's a pain to write or to use. Granted, the earlier versions of CSS didn't have these exit criteria, but there are people on the CSS Working Group who are on your wavelength.