Microsoft Wants To Participate In SVG Development

rossendryv writes "After many years of fighting against the standard, Microsoft announced they are joining the WC3's SVG working group to help with the development of SVG. 'We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation Web platform,' said Patrick Dengler, senior program manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team in a blog post."

Comments

Re:This Should Be Interesting

[LOLLinux]

It seems you must be confusing XAML with VML.

Re:This Should Be Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that Adobe has stopped supporting their SVG plug-in, right? It was all fine and dandy until they bought Macromedia and didn't need a Flash competitor anymore.

dom

Re:Translation:

[pete-classic]

Your point is well taken. But don't count Silverlight out yet. The sole fact that Netflix uses it for their streaming service is reason enough.

-Peter

Re:Oh thank you so very much.... NOT

[wealthychef]

Microsoft has a proven track record and a known strategy of packing standards boards to subvert them for their own uses. I'm thinking of a recent story in which a presentation was leaked about this, cannot find the citation

Re:SVG development?

[gringer]

More recent versions of emacs are able to render SVG files, and I have actually used it on a few occasions to clean up some SVG files (particularly to reduce their file size).

Re:Oh thank you so very much.... NOT

[denis-The-menace]

It was probably about getting OOXML to become an ISO standard that only MS could comply with...

"In order to gain ISO approval, Microsoft needed to garner the requisite number of “P” votes, and the influx of many new “P” voting members, most of whom were in favour of OOXML, was striking."

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft-ooxml-and-iso

Re:Translation:

[anastasd]

Yep, Flash is a crime against humanity. :)

Re:Torpedo?

[cstdenis]

xBSD junk See linux but with a worse UI.

BSD runs the same xorg/KDE/Gnome as Linux, not a worse UI, the SAME bad UI.

If you want to criticize it you should be complaining about it's lesser hardware compatibility (in terms of multimedia, etc) or less features (eg. no clustered file system/DRBD equivalent).

Re:This Should Be Interesting

[BitZtream]

XAML is more like XBL (mozilla), not really like SVG. Its used for interface definitions, not graphics. Contrary to popular belief, both flash and SVG can be used for user interfaces, and you're a fucking retard if you do it.

VML is more like SVG. Its made for turning structured data into pretty pictures that use carbon based lifeforms find more useful.

Theres nothing wrong with competing standards initially, there is also nothing wrong with saying 'alright, we didn't when, we'll support your idea instead'. Why do you have a problem with them giving up and doing what you wanted in the first place.

Your last paragraph is about right. I'm not going to praise Microsoft for being special because they made this choice, its just the right thing to do. I'm happy they aren't taking the typical MS approach YET.

Please kill flash. Please. I'm really tired of Adobe. I used to love them, after my first couple of years of using photoshop 2, I probably would have ranked them as one of the greatest software companies in the world. Unfortunately, they've got to the point where their apps are mature and theres nothing else to do, so now they are doing what MS and EA does and basically just changing things every so often to entice or induce you into upgrading, forcefully if possible.

If killing flash means I have to deal with MS for the time being, so be it. I'd rather just have to deal with MS (XAML or VML) and SVG, than deal with MS, SVG, AND Adobe (flash).

The only thing really needed to kill flash is someone to make a C SVG renderer that doesn't suck. Don't bother telling me about the C SVG renderers out there, I know about them and they all suck donkey balls. All browser implementations are utter crap and no browser should claim SVG support. Yes, you can draw a smiley face, but thats pretty much where it ends, nothing non-trivial renders properly in any browser, FORGET about interactivity, filters or animation or other SMIL linking (like sound).

Re:This Should Be Interesting

[BitZtream]

Look, you can knock IE for not supporting SVG, but the fact that Firefox and WebKit know about SVG and will in some cases display them is not the same as them SUPPORTING SVG.

Firefox and WebKit both suck ass at SVG support, if you don't think so than you really haven't done anything with SVG outside of some examples you found on the web.

No browser supports any SVG 'standard', IE is far from alone.

When I need to use SVGs on a web page, I end up embedding a Java applet using Apache Batik so I at LEAST have support for the useful portions of the standard beyond basic filled text and primitive shapes.

As SVG support in browsers stands now, you render to an image and display it rather than attempting to let the browser handle it, that is, if you want the SVG to actually work as designed.

When someone creates a open (IE: BSD licensed so EVERYONE can actually use it) C SVG library, and the browsers actually pick up on it, THEN I'll start worrying about which browsers support SVG, until then SVG is more of a joke than XAML or VML, both of which have better support on OSes other than Windows than SVG has anywhere (with the exception of Java apps using Batik).

Re:This Should Be Interesting

[shutdown -p now]

XAML is an XML serialisation format for a set of namespaces that define UI widgets

That is incorrect. XAML is a general-purpose XML-based serialization format for CLR object trees (and, in .NET 4, arbitrary object graphs). It doesn't have much to do specifically with UI. For example, the following is a perfectly valid piece of XAML markup, describing a collection with three elements:

<sc:ArrayList xmlns:s="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"
              xmlns:sc="clr-namespace:System.Collections;assembly=mscorlib"
              Capacity="100">
    <s:Object/>
    <s:String>Foo</s:String>
    <s:Int32>123</s:Int32>
</sc:ArrayList>

It just so happens that WPF (and Silverlight) provide a set of UI-related classes, instances of which are typically combined into trees, and hence are convenient to represent in XAML.

Re:SVG development?

[BitZtream]

Depends.

Preface: I create non-trivial SVGs that pull in customer data to create a static image for web pages. An example would be something like a tshirt printing website that uses SVGs as templates and allows the user to enter text to be displayed on the shirt and presenting it to the user for verification of the design before printing it. Its far more complex than that as we have custom images, company wide data, all sorts of stuff, the templates can be rather complex and result in SVGs which are several megs in size.

All of these pros and cons are from my perspective and requirements, they wouldn't apply to some guy who just wants to make drawings for him/herself for instance. One of my requirements is that the SVG is 100% compliant with the SVG standard, or with the 1.2 working draft.

Basic SVGs? I prefer Sketsa (Commercial and overpriced), but we use Batik as our backend processor, so the fact that they share the same rendering engine means I get WYSIWYG for the most part. It is however seriously lacking in features that we require.

As an editor, it doesn't support: text flows, setting attributes of the SVG elements that it is unaware of (can be fixed with a plugin, but I've not finished that code yet!), it has some seriously retarded bugs when setting attributes on elements that it does know about. Interactivity and animation, is a wash, I think the recent versions allow some basic things with an experimental plugin but I've haven't tried them. They were trying to make a flash-like editor interface at one point. It does produce SVGs that are standard compliant. I've yet to come across one that didn't validate and render properly in any known good rendering engine (Batik, Adobe SVG plugin, Renesis SVG plugin).

Inkscape, the latest release is actually getting to where its useful for my needs. Recent versions include text flow support which just makes me as happy as can be. It does some utterly retarded things as well. It uses its own custom extensions for filters even when saving in the 'standard' svg format rather than its own, even when the standard filters work the exact same way. Its rendering backend isn't very standards compliant. It won't pass even a small percentage of the tests for the most basic SVG profile test suite. It will now generate SVG fonts, but can't render SVG fonts used in documents. The font generation does not pass the SVG test suite however.

I can now use Inkscape to edit some SVGs without resorting to a text editor, but the fact that it saves with its own extensions even when I tell it to use the standard format means that in a lot of cases, its just used to generate a reference block of code that I use with a text editor.

Adobe Illustrator, for someone who knows nothing about SVGs and doesn't need to do anything really special, Illustrator works great. With the right export settings it will output very compliant SVG files. The code it produces isn't always the prettiest, but it does seem to work and it seems that Batik will pretty much always render it identical to Illustrator, which is a good sign. Good, but not perfect font support, it uses its own names so even if using system fonts, if you don't embed them in the document they fall back to the default when rendered in other renderers because the names don't match. Easy fix by embedded the fonts but this isn't always legally allowed and bloats the hell out of the file size in our case as we have to include all the glyphs in the font in the SVG file as the actual text in the SVG file may change at rendering time (these SVGs are really templates that pull in external data). We use this to allow low end graphics people who can stumble around illustrator to produce SVGs which we can then finalize by hand to be useful for our templates. It doesn't allow you to edit any of the attributes of SVG elements directly. It does allow for Interactivity and does do a good job of using proper SVG filters.

The one I always end up in however is a text editor. I generally use one o