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."

Comments

How to get rich from XML...

[Anonymous Coward]

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<plan>
  <step>Learn XML</step>
  <step>Give keynote speech about XML subset</step>
  <step>Profit!</step>
</plan>

Re:How to get rich from XML...

[generic-man]

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<sentence type='declarative'>
<!-- The user-agent should handle the closing period. -->
  <subject>
    <pronoun target='generic-man'>I</pronoun>
  </subject>
  <predicate>
    <verb sense='intransitive'>agree</verb>
    <prepositional_phrase>
      <preposition>with</preposition>
      <object>
        <adjective>this</adjective>
        <noun quantity='singular'>post</noun>
      </object>
    </prepositional_phrase>
  </predicate>
</sentence>

MirrorDot

[Anonymous Coward]

MirrorDot of the Keynote

Re:Que? No Explaino!

[starling]

[...]how will this effect me?

It won't. Your parents did that.

There isn't a single complete SVG viewer anywhere

[ikekrull]

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.