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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."
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<plan>
<step>Learn XML</step>
<step>Give keynote speech about XML subset</step>
<step>Profit!</step>
</plan>
MirrorDot of the Keynote
What is this new technology
SVG? New? Not that is news! SVG 1.1 was ratified on the 14th of January, 2003. Most SVG users either view the files in the Adobe Plugin, or translate to raster images for vector charting and the like. (I actually had a pretty cool 3D pie chart program for awhile there. SVG came out of one end, translated by Batik, then viewed as a PNG.)
why should I care about it
You shouldn't. It's just technology marching on. If you need to do vector graphics, you'll find it far more up-to-date and better supported than PostScript. If you don't need to do Vector graphics (or don't even know what vector graphics ARE) then you definitely don't care.
As a computer expert of 20 years and programmer of 15 years, how will this effect me?
You'll need a new bullet-point on your resume in a few years?
Will I have to learn totally new things, or does it build on the old ones?
You know XML? You know PostScript? How about ECMAScript? Yes? You're good to go then.
Who owns the patents to this new technology?
It's older than the hills technology. I dunno, maybe my great grandmother had a patent at some point, but there are none now. (Unless someone invents a stupid one like "Method for storing Vector graphics in XML." Hmm... maybe it is patented.)
Will Microsoft release their own version of it and crush everyone?
Microsoft Internet Explorer (Exploder in my book) needs the Adobe plugin. AFAIK, Microsoft is mostly ignoring it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
[...]how will this effect me?
It won't. Your parents did that.
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
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/
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
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.