Google To Host International SVG Conference

stelt writes "On Oct.2–4 Google will host the international conference on Scalable Vector Graphics at its campus in Mountain View, California. The SVG Open conference schedule shows developers and designers of various backgrounds. Major brands, open source projects, universities, and individuals are presenting on a variety of subjects like interactive scientific visualizations, mobile web animation art, internationalization and localization in print, geo-systems, etc. A couple of weeks back we discussed Google's adding SVG support to IE, and details of this project will be presented during the keynote 'SVG in Internet Explorer and at Google.'" Early-bird registration has already ended for this conference, but the pricing is not steep.

Comments

Re:Really, about time.

[morgan_greywolf]

It's been somewhat amazing to me that an open standard for any kind of scalable vector graphics model on the web has taken so long to take off. The web has mostly been a graphical environment with bandwidth constraints. It seems a natural. I suspect a conspiracy.

SVG has been around for quite sometime. The first specifications were released in 2001, Every major browser except IE supports SVG out of the box. The biggest reason it has been slow in adoption is the lack of support in IE, which is mostly due to Microsoft's former stagnation between the releases of IE 6.0 and IE 7.

The concept of vector-based graphics wasn't so big in the early days of the Web mostly because computers, consumer desktops especially, were underpowered for display lots of complex vector graphics very quickly, as anyone who was using Corel Draw or even Illustrator in the early 90s can certainly attest to.

Nowadays, though PCs have plenty of horsepower to draw vector graphics quickly, so long you keep the number of nodes down. :)

Re:Really, about time.

[derGoldstein]

You may want to look up previous postings on /. regarding SVG.

Here's a quick list:
1) The complete SVG standard is huge. While every modern browser "supports SVG", they really only support certain subsets, and these are not consistent between the different browsers.
2) You need development tools for designers in order for it to take off. Since Adobe bought Macromedia (and thus push Flash like crack), few companies have the manpower/skill to create a dynamic (animation-friendly) design/development environment targeted at web *designers*. You need SVG to be adopted by graphic designers, not just programmers.
3) Flash.
4) Flash.
5) Canvas is a much simpler and smaller standard, and it's much easier to implement. Browsers that integrate Canvas usually implement it in its entirety, and then they can place the "supports Canvas" sticker on their list of features. To do so with SVG would take too long and would require a lot more resources.

The path of least resistance is not SVG. It's a very promising standard, and programs like Inkscape have done wonders with it (and so has KDE), but in browser-land there are simpler solutions that are more widely supported.

Poor Opera really

[Ilgaz]

I see Opera, still a small company compared to others have sponsored the event and they are one of the earliest ones to support SVG inside browser.

Result? Not even mentioned in scoop. No matter what they do, what they invent, they never get mentioned anyway.