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SVG On the Rise 186

Posted by CmdrTaco from the amazing-scalable-graphics dept.
AShocka writes "The W3C has just released Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and Mobile Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 as W3C Recommendations. W3C Fellow Dean Jackson has an article, on O'Reilly Network titled SVG On the Rise, in reply to Jacek Artymiak's article SWF Is Not Flash (and Other Vectored Thoughts). Also check out Dean's SVG answer to Powerpoint presentations at Visualising the Semantic Web in SVG."
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SVG On the Rise More

SVG On the Rise

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  • Correction (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That should read:

    The W3C has just released Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 [w3.org] and Mobile Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 [w3.org] as W3C Recommendations.
  • Can anyone summarize this technology with its advantages, disadvantages and impact?

    • Short summary of SVG (Score:3, Informative)

      by sgtsanity ( 568914 )
      It's vector graphics written using XML-ish code and are thus human readable. And plus, the specification is much more "open-source" than Macromedia's SWF file format is. It also has support for mobile devices, and is just so darned pretty.

    • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:24AM (#5107524)
      Scalable Vector Graphics -- since it uses formulas (XML entities, really) for specifying where lines and shapes go instead of specifying location per-pixel, filesize will be small. Don't worry about XML verbosity preventing this, as SVG-files often are compressed.

      The availability of libraries as Batik [apache.org] makes SVG-generation flexible and easy. One example: One project I was on concentrated on pulling numbers out of a database and visualising them as a graph. Filling a XML-document with values and applying XSLT we had instant SVG. Upside: Very scalable and interactive (our customer was very fond of "hotspots" on the graph). Downside: Lack of plugins [adobe.com]. Fortunately, it was for their intranet.

      As to impact, I do hope this catches on. I much prefer coding Java + SVG than Flash, if just for the fact that not having the Flash-plugin doesn't prevent my regular development with SVG.
      • SVG-files often are compressed.
        The O'Reilly link mentioned use of gzip to effect this.
        Should, say, a Monopoly Short-circuit that with some proprietary scheme,
        one hopes that the market would break from its traditional hooverism and respond accordingly.
        OK, I'm thinking wishfully...
      • Adobe's SVG plugins seem to support Windows 98-XP, MacOS 9 & X, Linux (Red Hat 7.1) and Solaris. That seems like a pretty well-rounded portfolio. What other support could you even hope for from Adobe? FreeBSD? BeOS?

    • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cioxx ( 456323 )
      Lets start with disadvantages. Not many browsers support SVG in it's current form. Somehow the plugin is tied to Adobe, which the call the "recommended viewer". (Read: No rock-solid native browser support in IE, or in Mozilla/Phoenix)

      No widespread use. (Yes, I don't give a fuck if W3C is their mothers collectively endorse SVG, it was even dead before it got invented). Macromedia Swiff (.sfw) format is NOT closed source, and you have a better chance reaching your audience with it. Some people confuse .swf with Flash, and that's not the case. Now that you can import SWF into major Presentation titles, there is no reason why SVG could be of any use.

      As for advantages, it's based on XML spec, but then again, not everything that carries the name XML is something to go nuts over.

      In conclusion, I've been hearing how SVG was going to EXPLODE onto the web and portables in the next few years, and it never happened. That's what people were saying back in late 90's.

      • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well, kde is massively moving towards svg after kde 3.1 is done. That means most of the new icons are going to be svg, and konqueror is going to support it...

        I don't know, but that looks like it might be a good idea.

      • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tet ( 2721 ) <slashdot AT astradyne DOT co DOT uk> on Saturday January 18, 2003 @12:12PM (#5107695) Homepage Journal
        Macromedia Swiff (.sfw) format is NOT closed source, and you have a better chance reaching your audience with it.

        Yes and no. Sure, it'll work fine for the majority of the web browsing public. But once browsers start shipping with SVG plugins (or just native support) by default, then so will SVG. No one is arguing that SWF is the more mature, and more widespread format at the moment. But what about the content itself? If it's all in SWF, then it won't appear on search engines, so you're far less likely to have visitors driven to your site in the first place. SVG content, on the other hand, will be picked up so that Auntie Millie will find her cookie recipe in Google, even if the site in question uses an animated cookie chef to convey it's information. Furthermore, she'll be able to get at the content even if she's blind and using a braille terminal, or if she's using her mobile phone. The same can't be said of SWF. I agree that Flash is a pretty good product, but it suffers from three critical flaws, which have prevented me from using it to date. Firstly, it doesn't degrade if you browser isn't able to support it. Secondly, it changes the usage pattern of a browser. You want to go to the previous page? Click the back button. You want to open a new tab? Press Ctrl-T. You want to search for a given string? Ctrl-F. But not in Flash. Admittedly, Flash MX has made some progress in that area, but it's still got a long way to go. Finally, search engines won't index Flash content. SVG remedies all of those deficiences, which is why I hope to see it succeed.

        • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:4, Informative)

          by Allen Varney ( 449382 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @05:19PM (#5109307) Homepage

          Every time Flash comes up in a Slashdot thread, there's always some poster who hasn't heard of Flash MX [macromedia.com] saying "It doesn't support search engines, Unicode, accessibility, or the back button." The MX version has been out about a year now -- isn't it time to update your talking points?

          "It doesn't degrade if you browser isn't able to support it." And that browser would be -- what, Lynx? Which also lacks SVG support, and always will.

          As for "the majority of the Web browsing public," that's a very mild way of saying that the Flash plug-in is (according to Macromedia) the most pervasive software in the world, with over half a billion users [macromedia.com]. Given that Flash MX has strong XML support, and that it's now targeting "rich Internet applications" instead of ordinary vector animation, SVG has a long uphill battle ahead.

          • "It doesn't degrade if you browser isn't able to support it." And that browser would be -- what, Lynx?

            Yes, and the browsers in mobile computers. And the browsers that blind people use.

            Which also lacks SVG support, and always will.

            Doh! That's why the fact that SVG degrades gracefully is important! SVG can have XHTML or GIF alternate code embedded.

            • Yes, and the browsers in mobile computers. And the browsers that blind people use.

              There are Flash players for various models of cellphones and PDAs already, and more in the works. And Flash MX supports what Macromedia calls "assistive technologies functionality." It complies with government standards for .gov Web site accessibility by the blind and disabled.

              SVG can have XHTML or GIF alternate code embedded.

              Seems to me a Web page designer who can embed alternate XHTML code would find it trivial to implement a Javascript or other server-side check for the presence of the Flash client, then "degrade" to static pages as needed. Even if SVG becomes a widespread standard, I could imagine a lot of pages checking for Flash first, then "degrading" to SVG -- because Flash files are compressed binaries, far smaller than the equivalent SVG.

              • There are Flash players for various models of cellphones and PDAs already, and more in the works.

                The devices that Flash is deployed upon (e.g. Nokia's 9210 Communicator [macromedia.com], soon) are much more hefty than the ones SVGt is being optimized for (e.g. Nokia's 3650 and 7650 [w3.org]). Furthermore, SVG is being sold with the platform, such as TI's OMAP chipset platform [3g.co.uk]. That chipset has a huge percentage of the cell phone market.

                And Flash MX supports what Macromedia calls "assistive technologies functionality."

                Nevertheless, SVG's markup-based, HTML-integrated syntax is much better optimized for accessibility.

                Flash's licensing model [macromedia.com] is inherently anti-accessibility because it does not allow the creation of competitive "viewers" including viewers optimized for blind people. SVG is not so-encumbered.

                Seems to me a Web page designer who can embed alternate XHTML code would find it trivial to implement a Javascript or other server-side check for the presence of the Flash client, then "degrade" to static pages as needed.

                Those are the kinds of hacks that make the Web much less easy to index, download and otherwise manipulate. Scripting is a fallback, to be reserved [com.com] for exceptional tasks.

                Even if SVG becomes a widespread standard, I could imagine a lot of pages checking for Flash first, then "degrading" to SVG -- because Flash files are compressed binaries, far smaller than the equivalent SVG.

                SVG files can also be compressed binaries [w3.org]. GZIP compression is a required part of the specification. That's the better way to do binary compression because almost every language and platform has a gzip implementation.And because they use mathematical animation rather than frame-based animations, they will often be smaller than Flash files. Try again!

                To me, the issues are clear. Flash has a much better existing toolbase and a much larger deployed audience. SVG has a much stronger technical architecture and is achieving rapid uptake in all sorts of verticals. It will take years for SVG to seriously challenge Flash. But when it does, SVG will win because its technology is so much stronger and it is a true standard which already has literally hundreds of cooperating tool implementations for every language, platform and application and will have thousands in the not-too-distant future.

          • Not from what I can tell. The page you linked to says nothing about SE's, and a search on Google shows that Flash developers also say "no" [google.com].

    • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm a .NET programmer so I personally used the component from this page [yafla.com], which includes a brief introduction on SVGs, however in general SVGs represent the benefits of vector graphics over raster/bitmapped graphics (smaller size, print better, and scale better). It's unfortunate that everyone can only see SVGs as competition to Flash (I see SVGs as competitions to GIFs and PNGs personally), however it should be noted that it is a virtual certainty that Microsoft will include native SVG support in the next Internet Explorer. Overnight SVG will become the premiere vector format despite all the Flash kiddies ranting on about how "open" Flash is (these must be the same people who call Java open).

      In other words, if you're looking to create a cartoon on the web with nice tools and full multimedia synchronization then take a look at Flash and its tools today, but if you want to add vector graphics to a corporate intranet and so, definitely look at SVGs. One of the biggest features of SVGs that got me interested in the first place was the ability to completely embed the graphic in the webpage: While this goes against the spirt of HTML, this composite page was a godsend for a site which allowed users to email or download single file (i.e. non-zipped) reports.

    • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Allen Varney ( 449382 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:57AM (#5107634) Homepage

      Other posts in this thread have listed some disadvantages of SVG, but omitted that a browser plug-in fully implementing the spec weighs in at several megs. This is in contrast to the Flash player, which is still under 500K in the latest version. Not an issue for broadband users, but they are still a minority in the Web world.

      • Unless I'm mistaken, the SVG plugin is built right in to IE6 and above. Most windows users have it and don't even know it.

      • Re:For idiots like me - (Score:2, Informative)

        by kwoo ( 641864 )
        Other posts in this thread have listed some disadvantages of SVG, but omitted that a browser plug-in fully implementing the spec weighs in at several megs.

        Last time I built Amaya [w3.org] it only weighed in at several megs itself -- and it's a browser, WYSIWYHYGOOB (What You See Is What You Hope You Get On Other Browsers) XHTML editor, and to the best of my knowledge, fully supports SVG and MathML (which although unrelated, is nice if you don't have LaTeX2HTML or HeVeA handy).

    • We use it a lot at work for visualising maps. It's really catching on for cartography, and we're currently experimenting with what it can do. I had quite a bit of success using SVG for a query interface to a geographic database (a bond style zoomable map no less :).

      One issue is the only viewer that actually implements all the spec is the Adobe one, which revs infrequently and doesn't work in Mozilla. For development I ended up needing to run IE with the plugin under Wine so I could work on Linux. Performance is also a concern.

      So - this time around I'm using the Moz native support, which is pretty good. SVG may never replace Flash (and so what if it doesn't) but there are a whole host of uses for vector graphics outside animations on the web.

    • Think of it as being like 2D VRML, which also hasn't made the long-term inpact it should have.

  • flash - SVG (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:12AM (#5107471)
    Does anyone know whether Macromedia Flash can export to SVG or - if not - any such features are planned for a future version?

    Good kudos to Macromedia if they would.
  • I'm wondering what tool was specifically used to create that SVG. I have used SVG to some degree, but the idea of writing SVG manually strikes me as a little more difficult than say, html.

  • So... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:14AM (#5107482)
    SWF - Propietary format, but easy to make via wizards and so forth for the 16 year old web designer in your neighborhood. Flash 5/MX easily warezed which nullifies some cost concerns fro the less scrupulous. Well known.

    SVG - Free format, but requires a foreknowledge of XML. Well supported by the mobile industry and some pretty heavy hitters [w3.org], but not particularily known by the public.

    Will both be implemented equally or will one ever edge out the other? Are we really going to have to suffer through Flash for much longer?

    • SWF is not a proprietary format. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:27AM (#5107534)
      OpenSWF.org [openswf.org] has the
      documents.

      SWF is the file format used by Macromedia Flash to deliver graphics, animation and sound over the Internet. Almost 95% of web users can view SWF content without having to install a new plug-in, and over 300 million people have downloaded the Flash player. Macromedia published the specifications for SWF in April 1998

      • Re:SWF is not a proprietary format. (Score:4, Informative)

        by mikechambers ( 642634 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:44AM (#5107591)
        you can find the flash 6 file format specification here:
        http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/lice nsing/fileformat/ [macromedia.com]
        • The license does not allow the creation of Flash players that compete with Macromedia's, or the creation of tools that read Flash and output something else (like SVG). That's hardly open.

          I don't see that anywhere in the license.
          The license does place some restrictions on the contents of any SWF files produced (must not have errors, must be playable on latest player, etc.); but I don't see anywhere that it states that other file formats can't be output, nor do I see anywhere that it states that competing products cannot be created.

          Unfortunately, I can't download the specification itself, because the form requires that Javascript be enabled to be able to download the specification.

          • The license does place some restrictions on the contents of any SWF files produced (must not have errors, must be playable on latest player, etc.); but I don't see anywhere that it states that other file formats can't be output, nor do I see anywhere that it states that competing products cannot be created.

            The license says: You aren't allowed to use specification to create applications that do NOT output SWF: i.e. other players. Don't you think that if they wanted to allow products that either "import" or "output" SWF they would have said so? They didn't, so they didn't mean that.

            • I just don't see that anywhere in the license.
              The only thing I see that comes close are restrictions 3d and 3e, which I interpret to mean that if the product outputs SWF files, then it must adhere to those restrictions.
              If they wanted to state that the product must output SWF files, they should have made that statement unconditionally, and then stated the types of SWF files that must be output.
              For example, instead of "You agree that your Product must output SWF files that can playback without Errors in the latest versions of the Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh ...", they should state "You agree that your Product must output SWF files, and these files must be playable without Errors in the latest versions of ...".

              The restrictions in their license are analogous to "You must speak quietly in the library", which doesn't mean that you must speak and speak quietly, but rather means that if you speak, you must speak quietly.
              So I interpret those restrictions to be in effect only if my app outputs SWF files, not that it must output SWF files.

              Even if statements 3d and 3e mean that the product must always output SWF files, it doesn't mean that the product can't output other things (such as video output to the screen).
              Just output the SWF file to /dev/null.

              Caveat: IANAL, but my interpretation seems sensible to me.
              • The license says that you can use the specification ONLY for the production of software that outputs SWF: you are granted a nonexclusive license to use the Specification for the sole purposes of developing Products that output SWF.

                Sole purpose. No other purpose. I.e., not for the purpose of import or viewing. Why would they use the words "sole purpose" if they intended to leave other options open? why would they use the word "output" without mentioning "input???"

    • Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)

      by mosch ( 204 )
      you can save graphics from illustrator into svg format, no knowledge of xml required.

  • SVG && Printing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by schlpbch ( 197942 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:14AM (#5107485) Homepage
    As all graphics are vector based, SVG also has the potential to provide crystal clear, high resolution print-outs instead of the blurred GIFs (or PNG if anyone cares) we get to today.
    • So do Swiffs (and host of other formats), because they're all vector based.

      You consider that an advantage in SVG?

      SVG and web authoring don't mix, and why would anyone want to print Gifs or PNGs? Clarify please.

      • Re:SVG && Printing (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ergo98 ( 9391 )
        You talk as if vector graphics are pervasive, yet overwhelmingly examples on the net can show where people convert vector graphics to a raster format (particularly charts, graphs, and maps).

        SVG and web authoring don't mix, and why would anyone want to print Gifs or PNGs? Clarify please.

        This makes no sense. In the real world most intranets now have HTML reporting functionality (with CSS printing layout), and users print this. SVG is another step in the evolution of that being a credible data information system for corporations.
    • I think you mean to say all graphics could be described as vectors, even though not all graphic formats use vectors in their implimentation

      • As all graphics are vector based, SVG also has the potential to provide crystal clear, high resolution print-outs instead of the blurred GIFs (or PNG if anyone cares) we get to today.

        I think you mean to say all graphics could be described as vectors, even though not all graphic formats use vectors in their implimentation

        Well, I think he meant to say that when you're using SVG (instead of some other (raster) format), all the elements of your graphics are vector-based. Even though it sounded that way grammatically, since he said "all graphics", he couldn't have meant "all graphics, everywhere, are vector-based", since that would just be too absurdly dumb, and especially since he also specifically contrasted vector graphics with raster formats like GIF. If he thought GIF was vector-based, then what would he think was different about SVG?

        If we give him the benefit of the grammatical correction, then it's a valid and interesting point, though it's really more an argument for vector formats in general, and I don't know that I'd have marked it all the way up to (+4, Interesting). I mean, like, duh -- high-resolution rendering has always been, like, the whole point of vector graphics; why else are TrueType and PostScript fonts better than bitmaps?

  • SodiPodi (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jamesots ( 214246 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:17AM (#5107495) Homepage

    SodiPodi [sodipodi.com] is an SVG editor for Linux and (recently) Windows. It's not complete yet, but from the look of it it should be pretty good when it is.

  • SVG not (yet?) for presentation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by digitect ( 217483 ) <digitectNO@SPAMdancingpaper.com> on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:22AM (#5107515)

    I took a quick look at SVG for a proposal. It required animation with syncronized audio narration so SVG wasn't a possibility. I still don't see that SVG supports this and can't imagine SVG to be even remotely as useful as SWF in the realm of multi-media presentation. Sure it makes sense in more technical applications like mapping or calculated interactive diagrams, but I don't fear we'll be subjected to a rash of slow-loading SVG page banners any time soon. Bit of a shame, actually.

    • Re:SVG not (yet?) for presentation (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fastolfe ( 1470 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @12:39PM (#5107799)
      SVG is not intended to do synchronized multimedia. The G in SVG stands for "Graphics". If you want to build an all-out presentation with animation and audio, use SMIL [w3.org] in conjunction with SVG (or whatever you want for the graphics/animation side).

      • Sweet, dude! Muchas gracias for the excellent link, I had never heard of SMIL before. (Half the time I post, it's just trolling for more info. ;) It doesn't look so mature, have you used it or know of any examples you can point me to?

        Thanks again.

    • I took a quick look at SVG for a proposal. It required animation with syncronized audio narration so SVG wasn't a possibility.

      Perhaps not with the implementation you had available, but SVG was always meant to be used with the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) which can certainly handle syncronized audio narration.

      I still don't see that SVG supports this and can't imagine SVG to be even remotely as useful as SWF in the realm of multi-media presentation. Sure it makes sense in more technical applications like mapping or calculated interactive diagrams, but I don't fear we'll be subjected to a rash of slow-loading SVG page banners any time soon. Bit of a shame, actually.

      If this is your only complaint with SVG then you don't really have a complaint with SVG. Tell Adobe, Corel and the other implementors that you want more of SMIL implemented. You also have the option of using Javascript to generate sound, of course...

    • Keynote is XML based. Am I too assume that SVG is/will be supported?
    • Adobe SVG Viewer 3 [adobe.com] also supports a SMIL 2 [w3.org] implementation of an audio element [protocol7.com] which can be synchronized with animations. This would allow you to synchronize your audio narration with your vector graphics animations.

      Version 4 of Adobe SVG Viewer (renamed Adobe Image Viewer [adobe.com]) also supports synchronization of video elements. Unfortunately Adobe Image Viewer only supports viewing SVG files that are embedded in Acrobat PDF files.

  • Ahh, the advancement of graphics. (Score:3, Funny)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:23AM (#5107521)
    It's amazing how graphics formatting is "advancing". But, SVG is a telling format for the future.

    I predict that within the next 5 years W3 will have another new, "better", standard. It will rely on embeding the graphics in the web pages themselves, similar to SVG. But, it will greatly simplify programming with its Reduced Instruction Set Code(RISC). The code syntax will consist only of Peek(x,y) and Poke(x,y). Simple huh?

  • Some Goodies (Score:5, Informative)

    by webword ( 82711 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:25AM (#5107528) Homepage
    Flash Player for Linux [hitsquad.com] (Obvious)

    Flash Usability [flazoom.com] (Flazoom!)

    SWF Extractor [imagespro.com] (Windows prgrams that extracts images and mp3 files from a SWF file as separate files)

    Unlock SWF [buraks.com] (Open up compressed SWF files)

    SWiSH [swishzone.com] (Low cost alternative to Macromedia)

  • Please take my advice (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Amsterdam Vallon ( 639622 ) <amsterdamvallon2003@yahoo.com> on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:28AM (#5107540) Homepage
    I'm not sure if SVG sucks yet since it's incredibly new and everything, but no one I know has used it.

    In theory, it is a good idea, but it is only "widely accepted" (pronounced: "anticipated") by programmers who have been talking trash about Flash usability and want to play with vector art without losing face.

    Stick to Flash until SVG picks up some steam. The World Wide Web Consortium has been very optimistic about it, promoting its native-ness in future browsers, but my money's on Flash until it gets all sorted out.

    • Re:Please take my advice (Score:5, Informative)

      by smallpaul ( 65919 ) <paul @ p r e s c o d . net> on Saturday January 18, 2003 @01:16PM (#5107962)

      In theory, it is a good idea, but it is only "widely accepted" (pronounced: "anticipated") by programmers who have been talking trash about Flash usability and want to play with vector art without losing face.

      SVG has wide usability and even popularity in tasks far beyond Flash's ability. For instance SVG is the standard display format for geographical applications [academy-computing.com]. SVG is used for some scalable KDE icons. SVG can be [kde.org] natively produced [sourceforge.net] using open source software on open source operating systems. SVG is going to be embedded in the next generation of cell phones [w3.org]. SVG is going to be embedded in upcoming printers as a page description language [svgopen.org]. It is possible to print to SVG as you might print to Postscript or PDF. It is also possible to directly [mattercast.com] render PDF to SVG. And you will soon be able to output Visio diagrams [xml.org] as SVG. I've even heard of an SVG front-end for NetHack.

      The point is that SVG can achieve popularity much greater than Flash's without displacing a single Flash animation. And once it has done that, it will be a small additional step to wipe Macromedia's proprietary, binary crap off of the face of the earth. ;)

      By all means, use Flash for the time being. It is the best tool for many jobs. But don't think that SVG is a "theory." It is used by thousands of people in practice, in both commercial [corel.com] and open source [mozilla.org] projects. There are many businesses dedicated [savagesoftware.com] to [bitflash.com] building [zoomon.com] SVG [universalmap.com] tools [roitsystems.com], and whole industries being re-imagined [umtsworld.com] around SVG. Its recent growth curve is amazing and I'm convinced it will be remembered as being as important as other major W3C specs such as XML and HTML before it.

  • SVG Support (Score:3, Informative)

    by jaaron ( 551839 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:29AM (#5107542) Homepage
    I have several projects at work right now that use SVG and there are cases where it's wonderful to use. For those interested, I would suggest Apache's Batik [apache.org] project.

    The biggest problem I've encountered so far is with Mozilla. Unfortunately, Mozilla's SVG capabilities are non-existant and the current Adobe SVG plugin doesn't work with the brower.

    • SVG Support & Mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ukryule ( 186826 ) <slashdot@yule . o rg> on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:37AM (#5107575) Homepage
      There is a Mozilla project working on SVG support [mozilla.org], but it's not yet seriously usable.

      It also suffers from a licensing problem: it uses libart [gnome.org], which is licensed under the LGPL, which (for some reason) means it can't be included as standard in mozilla builds.

      There is also an Adobe plugin [adobe.com], which does claim to work with mozilla, but it crashes more often than not ...

      • Adobe SVG does crash Mozilla 1.x (Score:5, Insightful)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:57AM (#5107635) Homepage Journal
        Actually, the Adobe plugin does not work with any 1.x version of Mozilla. It's bug #133567, which you can't access via a link from Slashdot. It's been in the release notes for some time, seeing as there are many people who both use Mozilla for standards compatability and are using SVG as a emerging technology. Of course, now they can't do the two at the same time.

        Basically, Adobe used an "unfrozen" API that changed between version 0.9.9 and the 1.0 release, breaking the plugin around the end of March 2002. The bug report contains an interesting back-and-forth between Mozilla and an Adobe developer, where basically the Mozilla developers admit that they completely fucked Adobe with their plugin interface.

        (In order to allow scripting with the SVG plugin, they had to use some unfrozen interfaces. Although the interface that seems to cause the most crashes is the network code (nsHttpChannel), if I'm reading the crash dumps correctly.)

        It's now 2003, and it appears that Mozilla has sucessfully gotten Adobe to say "screw this" and stop supporting the Mozilla browser all together. I'm hoping that with the release of the 1.1 SVG spec, Adobe will finally release an SVG plugin that works with newer Mozilla builds. But I think the tech evangelism team has successfully made that highly improbable by completely and totally pissing the developers at Adobe off, and this is highly unlikely.

      • The backend for SVG support has recnetly been rewritten to allow plugins for native rendering on different OS's.

        For instance, visitors to recent nightlies may notice two options for Win32:

        mozilla-win32-svg-GDI-mathml.zip

        Which uses a GDI plugin for rendering SVG on win32 and:

        mozilla-win32-svg-libart-mathml.zip

        Which uses libart :), and so can't be part of the official Mozilla builds as the code isnt tri-licenced under the GPL/LGPL/MPL

        (BTW, both builds also include Calendar)
      • Actually it implements most of the spec, there are still bits missing like declarative animation, but so far I'm finding it OK.

        libart is incompatable because it needs to be availabe under the Mozilla tri-license, but on Windows it uses GDI+ now anyway so that's only a concern for Linux.

      • I don't see what would stop Mozilla using an LGPL library. Even proprietary software can use LGPL libs so long as any changes to the lib itself are made public. And Mozilla certainly isn't proprietary seeing as it's mostly tri-licenced as MPL/LGPL/GPL itself. As all of the source of Mozilla is available via CVS anyone else can grab changes quite easily.
        • You might be on to something there. From ldd:

          mozilla/mozilla-bin:
          [...]
          libgtk-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 (0x40246000)

          GTK is certainly LGPL also!!!! What exactly is the problem here again?
          • I think it's more about politics than real license issue.

            Mozilla team rejects libart (LGPL) and at the same time includes GTK (also LGPL). Strange, isn't it? But it doesn't look strange if you'll try to read some discussions in their bugzilla, like this one [mozilla.org], where they buried out XFORMS b/c Why not just do it all in html and keep extending html. Basically, "we don't need any new standards, we need just some bugs to be fixed".

            Look at other Mozilla projects having been promising and now dead [mozdev.org]. Look at their Roadmap [mozilla.org] - only version numbers, no info about any planned features (compare it with, for example PostgreSQL TODO [postgresql.org] list).

            Gecko is (or was?) the most promising GUI technology I see today. It allows much more than HTML browsing - it allows to build real applications on the web. And several non-browser projects have been developed (i.e. mail). But tell me the name of any Gecko project newborn in last 6 months? Or old one riched its v1.0 quality in last 12 months? Did I miss something or nobody cares about Gecko anymore?

            I think that for a long term Mozilla as project is slowing down and it may eventually die. At least with its current development team.

  • Despite the fact that the internet is already tained by flash and other multimedia rubbish, the W3C creates another graphics standard to increase to rubbishness and slughishness of the internet.
    Why not a standard for bloating websites (BDF - bloated document format), unreadable graphics rubbish (BEDL - bleeding eye document language) and web browser incompatibility enforcing documents (HCML - hypercrash markup language) ?

  • Mozilla and SVG (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:33AM (#5107558)
    Looks like Mozilla has a project to supoort SVG The Mozilla SVG Project. [mozilla.org]

    While we are still a long way away from full SVG support, the subset currently implemented is already pretty useable. We have support for all basic shapes including beziers, stroking and filling with opacity and much of the DOM.

    The samples at croczilla.com/svg/ should give you a good idea of the features currently implemented.

    Big areas where we're still lacking include text, clipping, filters and declarative animations.

  • Vectors Rule! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jamesjw ( 213986 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @11:41AM (#5107585) Homepage
    I have always liked vector imaging, being able to export it as a raster image or keep it as a vector to be resized and manipulated easily.

    After all, complex 3D models rendered for video presentations, simulations and movies are just complex vectors and can allow easy and proportional scaling.

    Not to mention that most vector data compresses alot more than storing a high resolution raster image.

    I am all for an open/portable format thats compatable from CAD programs through rendering/moddeling software and raster paint packages. Postscript can do some of this but I find postscript a little too bloated in alot of cases..

    • I agree, CAD type 3D models via ASCII format is the Holy Grail. In Architecture, our computer tools are still baby-faced. It will be at least another five years before it is common practice to link specification, manufacturing, and schedule information to a 3D object, a model of not only the building but the whole project. (Something most industries, such as aerospace, already do today.) And yet, I think SVG is the first glimpse into this possibility.

  • The support for SVG in Mozilla isn't very good yet.

  • Piracy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by vocaro ( 569257 )
    I'm not an SWF programmer, but I know enough about it to realize that creating good presentations in Flash is an art form. The Flash author must be a skilled graphic designer as well as a talented programmer. And when these skills are applied to SWF, the results cannot be easily hijacked because of SWF's binary format. It would be like trying to disassemble executable code: possible, but difficult enough to discourage reverse-engineering.

    For instance, if the author creates a fancy animation routine as a Flash library and links it in the SWF, other Flash authors cannot easily copy that library and use it in their own projects. With SVG, however, being a pure-text human-readable format, what's to stop an author from viewing the SVG source and doing a cut-and-paste of the library into his own projects? From what I understand of SVG, there is nothing to stop unethical authors from stealing from the hard work of their more talented peers.

    This is the one example where SVG's implementation in XML is actually a bad thing. And in my book, it's a huge disadvantage of SVG that Jacek Artymiak's article failed to address. Perhaps it's even the reason why SVG has failed to overtake SWF on the web.


    • Things can always be done better. Does it make one a pirate if he sees the point in this?

      Am I not an artist if I choose to "give" my art to the people to use and learn from?

      Does it make me somehow a bad artist if I don't want to get paid for my stuff?

      What the heck do you mean by piracy anyway? All the great artists have been copied/plagiarized and most of the great artists have done it themselves. We can even check that out if you like, try classical composers, try painters, try modern musicians... The difference is, nowadays we have big corporations who think they are doing losses because of piracy. I believe the artists aren't often even asked about their opinion in this or then they have been lied to to make them think badly about "piracy".

      Are you an artist? Do you want people to enjoy your work, or do you want to cash in by stupidity?

      - Voice of Ambience -
      • Things can always be done better. Does it make one a pirate if he sees the point in this?

        I wasn't talking about doing things better; I was talking about taking another person's work and making it your own. For example, it's difficult to take a JPG image and change the text of that image. But with SVG, one could easily change the text of a logo from "Your Company, Inc." to "My Company, Inc." -- just do a search-and-replace using a text editor -- while preserving the font, colors, and everything else in the image.

        Am I not an artist if I choose to "give" my art to the people to use and learn from?

        With SVG, I'm saying you don't have a choice. It forces you to make your code viewable to anyone who views the image, whether you choose to or not.

        Does it make me somehow a bad artist if I don't want to get paid for my stuff?

        My point is not "art vs. money". I'm saying that if I paint a picture in SVG, the XML nature of that picture allows the image to be modified and decomposed easily by others. This is not possible with other image formats, such as GIF, JPG, or SWF.

        What the heck do you mean by piracy anyway?

        You're right; piracy is the wrong word. I guess what I should have said was "copyright infringement". SVG makes this much easier than other image formats.

        All the great artists have been copied/plagiarized and most of the great artists have done it themselves.

        You're talking about stealing artistic styles and ideas. I'm talking about stealing the actual code. One could not easily take the original Mona Lisa and change the background landscape to a picture of a city skyline. But if da Vinci had published his famous work in SVG, then that sort of thing could be done in a simple text editor without altering the original foreground image in any way. Okay, maybe that's a silly example, but I think it gets my point across.

        The difference is, nowadays we have big corporations who think they are doing losses because of piracy.

        I'm not thinking of big corporations; I'm thinking of myself. Let's say I make a logo in SVG for my webpage and spend a lot of time working on a nice gradient for the background. Then let's say some other webpage author visits my site and says, "Hmm. That's a pretty cool gradient. I don't want to take the time writing SVG code to implement that same gradient, so I think I'll open his SVG code into my text editor, delete the part that draws his logo, and replace it with my logo." So this guy was able to steal my work ("art") and use it for himself, possibly to make money, without any compensation for my time.

        Are you an artist?

        Do I make a living by creating art? No. Do I make logos and graphics for my web pages? Yes.

        Do you want people to enjoy your work, or do you want to cash in by stupidity?

        Why can't I do both? I believe an artist should be compensated for his time and effort so that he can continue to make great art.

    • what's to stop an author from viewing the SVG source and doing a cut-and-paste of the library into his own projects?

      Title 17, United States Code.

      The Berne Convention.

      What else do you need?

  • A Question of Trust (Score:3, Interesting)

    by satch89450 ( 186046 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @01:53PM (#5108202) Homepage

    Not mentioned anywhere by anyone so far: should we trust Macromedia's plug-in? One reason I don't allow the Flash plug-in to be installed on my computer is that I don't understand everything that it does, and how an author can mis-use the language to do things they shouldn't. Paranoid? Of course.

    So I did a search here [cert.org] on the CERT site to see the kinds of headaches that have been reported with Flash. The returned response shows that the plug-in isn't too awful, but still it is bad enough to tilt the scales in my case to not supporting Flash at all, on any platform. YMMV

    The same search of the CERT size for "svg" didn't yield anything, but that just means no one has found the hole yet, if there is one. Separating SVG and the multimedia functions means less opportunity for screwing up, or at least confining the exposure of any screwup. Maybe.

    Besides, I have yet to find any good use of Flash as a customer -- but then again, I'm a proponent that Web pages should inform, not entertain or mesmorize. Corporate America won't like my attitude, I'm sure.

  • The advantages of SVG (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kahei ( 466208 )
    I (and thus my company) have found SVG to offer compelling advantages over existing formats. This is in the field of presenting financial data. The main advantages seem to be:

    1 -- It's just XML. Whatever can emit XML can emit SVG, from a perl script to a huge j2ee system. Andthe perl script doesn't take long to write because SVG is a compact format that should be intuitive to anyone who understands scene graphs (and anyone else really).

    2 -- It's scriptable and interactive. In fact, SVG has an object model that integrates with that of a web page. This makes it easy to provide interactive charts or SVG graphic elements that participate in navigation -- and they'll do the same thing whether they're hosted in a web page or in an application or whatever.

    3 -- SVG is predictable and easy to handle. Bitmaps are horrible for presenting detailed technical data -- you can't zoom, you don't know how they'll print, you can't edit them easily when they're finished, they take up space. SVG is small, predictable, and can be 'fixed' by making changes to the text of the file.

    4 -- SVG is accurate. It is easy to generate SVG according to precise algorithms and know that the SVG renderer will draw the resulting lines in a predictable way. You do not have scaling/rasterizing issues (at least not as much).

    Overall, we have found SVG to be easy to teach, easy to distribute, and produce very good-looking and interactive results. I think it's a big, serious advance in presenting complex data, especially if you need to present it over the web or interactively. I do not see SVG as a replacement for Flash/other pretty picture formats, I see it as a replacement for .gif charts and .ps files, and it does very very well in this role.

    It's also a geek-freindly technology -- lots of cool filter toys, easy to integrate with your silly scripting language of choice. I love it :)
  • It is for vector graphics, not animation, sound, and other crap that I refuse to allow my browser to display. And because the player isn't closed-source, a plugin can be written allowing users to disable annoying features like sound, animation, and ad banner sized displays (if it had such features).

    I have to disable flash everytime I update a browser or macromedia program, which is very annoying. I have no problem with SVG, since it doesn't make my computer start playing annoying music when I load a web page.

  • I can't find it on their website, but according to an email I got, the March '03 issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal [ddj.com] is supposed to have an article on SVG if any of you are not content to read about it online.
  • I'm still waiting for a superior SVG editor/authoring system so I can use all of SVG's competitive features on my website. So far, the only offerings I've seen just aren't so great. I know there's one for KDE, but I don't run Linux as a workstation.

  • Flash vs SVG is more complicated (Score:4, Informative)

    by Monkeyman334 ( 205694 ) on Saturday January 18, 2003 @03:28PM (#5108751)
    As someone who is a regular on SVG lists for the past 7 months or so (not very long), I have already come across SVG book authors, W3C members, and Macromedia employees, and good ol' developers all having the very same debate that know the technology much better. And, surprise(!), no side has given up and said "Oh, you're right, lets start developing only with X." If you checked a 2 page SVG vs Flash demo and reposted some generic "SVG doesn't have as many authoring tools", although valid, it's a lot deeper than that. SVG is XML. A real W3C standard. Anyone can make their own client, and hopefully get around cross platform issues like HTML browsers. Which shouldn't be too bad, an SVG plugin is less of a commitment than your whole browser, and bad XML is just that, hopefully no "close enough" rendering. You can create SVG with XSLT or through any server side scripts that can output plaintext.

    Here are some great places for SVG demos:
    Pinkjuice/svg [pinkjuice.com]
    KevLinDev [kevlindev.com]
    Adobe SVG zone [adobe.com]

    And here are some SVG examples more "in the wild", which are usually mapping or graphing:
    http://www.netency.com/netenmap/index.php?p=demos [netency.com]
    http://www.oaklandtracks.com/noise/noise_managemen t_replay.html [oaklandtracks.com]

    Anyway, educate yourself and see where SVG can be applied. Good luck.
  • I've just started using the cvs version of Karbon [koffice.org] from the koffice project [koffice.org]. I haven't done vector art before, but this seems pretty simple to use.

    In this interview [ofb.biz] they talk with the authors of the Conectiva Crystal icons, and about using karbon to make them. They link to this screenshot [xs4all.nl].

    Even though this is my first venture into vector art, I must say I like it - it looks like it could even make an artist out of me!

  • I feel developers should always try to be as aware as possible about the technologies they use, without bias. Sometimes a client may request something be done in Flash, other clients may require that everything be as XML conformant as possible. Whatever the request, the developer needs to be aware of the pluses and minuses of each, and inform the client where need be. Flash has it's place, especially as Macromedia is putting in effort with MX to get it to address accessibility issues.

    There is another possible advantage to SVG, being XML compliant, that I have not seen addressed here, and that is SVG media/documents can be formatted on the fly, using XSLT for various media. CSS addresses media types for (I know the support for all is not there yet, but it is getting there)

    • screen
    • print
    • projection
    • handheld
    • tty
    • tv
    • aural
    • braille
    • emboss

    I saw Dean Jackson's presentation at the OzeWAI 2002 Conference [ozewai.org]. From what I could see, he was using Mac OSX, and Python XSLT tools to produce his PowerPoint like SVG slides. In this format, one should be able to configure completely different behaviour, look and feels for any of the desired end media formats. Without a file format based in structured markup, this becomes much more difficult to address. For this purpose, this is far more flexible.

    I do feel that as/if SVG is eventually built into browsers natively, there will need to be some user configurability to control the behaviour of the SVG, (and other media) in the browser. If there are animations the user needs to be able to easily turn them off (if they want too), or allow the user to turn them off by default. Users obviously want this type of control as each user is different, some may love animated web pages, others may not. SVG and user-agents need to be easily configurable and controllable. This should be pretty obvious given Mozilla's and Opera's preferences to allow the user to manage the DOM, and the market in Popup blockers for IE that manage the DOM and http refreshes and the like.

    As a side note, I really do not think the W3C is trying to box in/out developers. I try to follow most of the discussion groups associated with Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) [w3.org]. I can see how it would be easy to form the mistaken opinion that this bunch of people basically want a web driven by Lynx (or some really bland HTML). I ask those of you here that find the process of the W3C draconian, to just follow any of the active W3C discussion lists [w3.org]. I find a community of people that, for one have taught me a lot about how to work as a collaboration of people with different views and agendas, that are working with everyone to try and find a way to present the web in the most universal and open standards. There is often very healthy debate, and many people trying and working very hard not to limit the standards. The W3C is not the Web Police, it's just a standards body trying to build an equitable, accessible web (Maybe I'm really naive).

    Admittedly they do not do such a good job of marketing themselves and educating developers, but it is a democratic process, if you really don't like something and feel you have better solutions, or can improve, or help, join a working group and help improve the web.

    If you do follow a discussion list for a few months, and do not find what I stated, well.. you can email me a tell me what a flamin idiot I am (you may not be far wrong).

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