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."
Cant discuss.. site was pre /.ed... cant RTFA
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<plan>
<step>Learn XML</step>
<step>Give keynote speech about XML subset</step>
<step>Profit!</step>
</plan>
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
There's a blog post here with a link to another presentation from the conference.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
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
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.
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.