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."

"Community" ?

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..

Re:"Community" ?

Internet Explorer is the only major browser to NOT implement SVG and Canvas. Which is a major failure on Microsoft's part. One might almost say that they're intentionally trying to prevent the adoption of standards that could replace their proprietary APIs like VML and ActiveX. Almost, anyway. It's not like Microsoft has a history of not implementing the DOM standards or anything.

(*Hint!* That was sarcasm. Microsoft fails miserably at implementing the DOM2 standards.)

Re:"Community" ?

Internet Explorer is the only major browser to NOT implement <insert ANY interesting/useful non-proprietary feature or open standard here>

There, fixed that for you. The only thing MS is ever first on are the things that can't be implemented in any other browser because MS owns the technology.

Re:"Community" ?

Except for AJAX...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History_and_support [wikipedia.org]

I mean, they didn't come up with the cute name, but they did package the technology first.

Re:"Community" ?

But all 222 "web browser users" worldwide voted. Unless someone voted twice.

we'll vector you right up

Guys, guys.
We've got it covered. Just close your eyes, bend over, and wait for Silverlight.

Re:Hopeful in regards to Silverlight?

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.

Re:Hopeful in regards to Silverlight?

"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.

Re:Hopeful in regards to Silverlight?

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.

Re:Hopeful in regards to Silverlight?

Silverlight supports 32-bit and 62-bit browsers.

Sweet, where can I get a 62-bit browser?

I already have a two-bit browser, that would be IE7.

/Ducks

Vector graphics can't work

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>

yea. ajax. it has given us so much

and also openajax alliance constitutes what we call 'browser users' on the internet ...

that alliance should try to make ajax actually something of use to the internet, rather than trying to shape future browsers to their preference by staging limited scope polls and then pushing it as browser community's preferences.

or, we can just kill all buzzword crowd and get it over with.

"Override Back Button Event"???

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.

Re:"Override Back Button Event"???

<sarcasm>Well, you see... our new, half-assed, pieced-together technology will only properly work if we force users to use it the way we want. Remember: it's OUR content, so we get to determine how the USERS use it!</sarcasm>

<serious>UseIt.com [useit.com].</serious>

Re:"Override Back Button Event"???

As an end user and a project manager, I'd have to ask you why your code doesn't allow such a possibility. Not that I don't understand the added effort and difficulties (okay, technically, I don't; I don't program for the web), and it would suck to have to make it all work properly, but that's kinda your job.

Re:"Override Back Button Event"???

The problem is the back button causes a very very very large break in the sanity of web applications. You can kiss a consistent state goodbye.

I know I'm contradicting my sig, but I want to explain why you are wrong.

Session state is maintained on the server, not the client.

If you trust the client to provide you valid data about the state of the application, you are very stupid. This is how people get owned.

As such, you should remember what the user was doing, and if they open the application again, return them to where they were.

Disabling the back button is wrong. If your application cannot handle me leaving it any any time gracefully, it is a piece of shit. And if you absolutely must have control of my system, well, that's why we have xulrunner. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the web is probably not even the best way to deliver an application of that nature, but you could argue that one back and forth all day - my main argument is that users expect web pages to behave in a certain way.

The real issue here is that a webpage is not a standalone application, and you run into problems like these when you try to make it one. Webpages are forms, like screens on mainframes, and are request-oriented. Your web applications should be the same.

Re:"Override Back Button Event"???

Do a lot of web development? This is one feature I would love -- users can completely destroy how a web app works just by clicking on the back button and asking "where'd all my data go?"

They sure can. This might put the onus on you as the web developer to build a smarter app. Or to not build that particular as a web browser app at all. You've got options, and it's not like the back button is a new feature that's surprised you and thrown off your assumptions.

Re:"Override Back Button Event"???

If you consider yourself a "web developer" and don't know how to manipulate the URI fragment to make the back button work with AJAX, then you should just quit right now and become a politician or a lawyer or something. The back button is fundamental and all AJAX applications should work with it.

Re:"Override Back Button Event"???

Would seem to me that both camps can be made happy by allowing the developers to indicate that "THIS" page should not be added to the browser history.

So, if the user goes to the home page, then goes to a "view product" page, then goes through a purchasing process, you could suppress the pages involved in the purchasing process from being added to the history. If the user hits the back button half way through making a purchase, it would take them back to the "view product" page. If they then hit "forward", it would do nothing, because the "view product" page is the most recent entry.

Re:"Override Back Button Event"???

Then I right-click the link to the webapp and choose "Open in new window". In fact, as a browser user, the number one feature I'd like to add is an item in that popup menu: "Open in this tab".

222 random people on the Internet

It seems the vote was open to anyone on the internet, and only 222 people answered. There will probably be more people writing comments in this thread.

SVG animation

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 is needed is...

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.

'Bout time

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.

Re:Damn graphic artists...

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/ [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 [devpro.it] -- 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.