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Vector Graphics Lead Wish List For Future Browsers
Coach Wei writes "Community voting results and a summary report have been published from
OpenAjax Alliance's recent "community wishlist for future browsers" effort. When the voting closed on July 13th, 222 people participated in this open community initiative, with 143 people voted, 55 feature requests being written up, and contribution from many industry leaders. The voting indentified and prioritized 37 features. The top 10 are related to vector graphics, security, performance, layout, rich text editing, Comet, audio and video. Among all the feature requests, 2D Drawing/Vector Graphics is clearly the most desired feature by the community. It received most votes (110 people voted for it), and highest total score (over 10% higher than the second feature request). Looks like that it is time for all browsers, in particular, IE, to seriously consider supporting standards-based vector graphics."
I don't think the OpenAjax Alliance's poll reaches quite what would constitute the "web browser users" community. I'm also trying to figure out what the "particularly Internet Explorer" comment meant. Not that I read the article..
Whale
Guys, guys.
We've got it covered. Just close your eyes, bend over, and wait for Silverlight.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Where I work we're constantly scaling our web software needs to fit the situation, and I have yet to be able to cross a vector and a scalar!
<ducks>
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Ok, I'm normally a peaceful person, but if someone invents a way to trap me on a page and disable my back button I'll hunt that guy down and kill him. Seriously. I understand that AJAX doesn't play well with the back button, but if this cancellation of functionality is implemented so that every site can deploy it easily it will break the web as we know it.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
I tought SVG is already implemented in most modern browsers...
Not when you weigh each browser by its usage share on home and business workstations. As long as Windows Internet Explorer doesn't implement SVG, and as long as Windows Internet Explorer has more than 50 percent usage share, "most modern browsers" don't implement SVG.
I'm glad Firefox has SVG and is improving it. I really want to see SVG animation. It sucks to use java script just to cause a diagram to have a few moving parts when animate transform would do the trick.
The ONLY thing that has to be added, and needs to be added about ten years ago, is a date input field in forms.
One that is locale-aware (DD-MM-YYYY, MM-DD-YYYY, or whatever you're locale used). Currently you have to jump through several hoops and it is near impossible to get a foolproof date input.
Oh sure, NOW people understand we need vector graphics.
I saw NeWS demo'd by sun in 84. I used native postscript extensively in 88+.
Then I watched html make a mess out of nearly everything to do with the network (html email? huh?).
Bout friggin time poeple woke up.
Need Mercedes parts ?
You realize adobe has released an official flash player for Linux right? How did such an ignorant post get modded insightful?
Microsoft is not to be trusted, they have proven this time and time again. Silverlight itself is built on a platform designed to screw everyone in the IT world over.
Microsoft tried to corrupt Java and make it Windows only... and got stopped. So they cloned Java, e.g. .NET, and made it Windows only.
Mono is a few major revisions behind Microsoft's implementation. It doesn't support a large part of Microsoft's software stack. It is basically "Managed Wine."
It's not the kind of thing I'd want to rely on and no one in their right mind should let Silverlight put Microsoft in a position to take over the Internet.
So in short: avoid Silverlight like the plague that it is.
All that is nice, but what we need is a vector graphics kit that's not shipped by yet another fucking vendor. Something that's a spec, not a binary.
Of course you have to convert it to/from strings, duh, you can't put an abstract concept like an object on a wire and send it across the internet. So we represent the object some other way. A string is a perfectly fine way.
And -- Oh -- it's a string which which contains a JavaScript object literal. Now, what do you call the language subset which defines the string appearance of a Javascript object literal? JavaScript Object Notation seems pretty damned reasonable.
Don't like calling eval() to parse the object literal? Why not? It's an object literal; to turn ANY piece of source code (and that's what it is, source code for an object) you need to run a parser over it. It turns out that eval() is a pretty damned good JavaScript parser.
You could, if you we were so inclined, parse the JavaScript yourself. And, in fact, if you only wanted to support objects -- not the whole JavaScript language -- you might want to only parse a limited subset of JavaScript, which some freaky has guy (who works at Yahoo) has decided to call JSON.
Now, what's the best way to write a limited-function parser in JavaScript, and still have it be really fast?
Use native constructs.
Hmm, but does JavaScript have any native constructs which allow us to easily build parsers which understand small regular grammars? Hint: there's a reason they're called regular expressions.
So, the current common/secure technique is to use a regexp parser to validate the input to eval(), because that's the fastest way (two calls, both into native code).
Now, how the hell can we MAKE these objects? Well, it's pretty easy from JavaScript; the .toSource() method and/or uneval calls work pretty good.
So, we now have a general-purpose way to serialize/deserialize javascript objects into something we can send over a network. If you wanted to, that's enough to start a cult and try to build a career around. You could even describe it really complicatedly (like on http://www.json.org/). Or, you could build a compilcated object/class hierarchy around it, like this guy http://www.devpro.it/JSON/files/JSON-js.html -- I suppose you could even come up with something as complicated as DCOM or CORBA if you were really bored.
But it's still nothing more than winging JavaScript source code around the internet, and validating it somehow [regexp] if you don't trust its contents.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
"Adobe repeatedly refused to release an updated Flash plugin for Linux. That is why they skipped a version. They said they were done with Linux support. One guy kept pestering Adobe offering to code it for free, and the eventually let him create an updated Flash plugin. Allowing one man to do the work unpaid begrudgingly is not what I'd call supporting a platform." What are you talking about? I happen to know several engineers on the Flash Player team at Adobe that currently work on the Linux version. And as far as I know, the upcoming version, FP10, fully supports Linux as well.
Sweet, where can I get a 62-bit browser?
I already have a two-bit browser, that would be IE7.
/Ducks
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai