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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."
Cant discuss.. site was pre /.ed... cant RTFA
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.
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
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.
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.