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SVG 1.1 Becomes W3C Proposed Recomendation 174

Posted by michael from the step-2-XML-step-3-profit dept.
openbear writes "From the w3c web site... W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and Mobile SVG to Proposed Recommendations. Comments are welcome through 20 December. SVG delivers vector graphics, text, and images to the Web in XML. SVG 1.1 separates the SVG language into reusable building blocks. Mobile SVG re-combines them into two profiles optimized for cellphones and pocket computers."
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SVG 1.1 Becomes W3C Proposed Recomendation More

SVG 1.1 Becomes W3C Proposed Recomendation

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  • A what now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ejdmoo ( 193585 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @02:52AM (#4684168)
    A proposed recommendation for possibility of consideration of partial inclusion...

  • Awesome (Score:1, Funny)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 )
    Sounds like a novel idea, too bad I have no idea what they're talking about.

    • Re:Awesome (Score:4, Informative)

      by bluFox ( 612877 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:28AM (#4684304) Homepage Journal
      Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is XML specification for creating Vector graphics (It can be embeded in html pages)

      SVG can be used like flash , and you can use javascript to manipulate the shapes on page.

      See batik [apache.org]for an apache implementation of it and some examples (quite nice ones) , and adobe provides a nice viewer for the svg too..

      The good point bt vector graphics is that it is scalable , and sizing of images do not affect the clarity/sharpness of the images


      ---

      • The GNOME [gnome.org] project uses SVG for UI graphics extensively.
        For example, see the Scalable Gorilla [gnome.org] theme for Nautilus.

        • Re:Awesome (Score:3, Informative)

          by WowTIP ( 112922 )
          Now, hold your horses.

          Saying that Gnome uses SVG extensively is an exaggeration at this point. The only use of SVG in Gnome so far, is for rendering icons on the desktop and in Nautilus. There are plans for letting other UI elements be SVG based to, but they are just plans. If you plan using SVG icons as desktop icons you also better make some PNG renderings of them too, if you want the same theme in the panel and menus, since you can't use SVG there yet.

          Also, Nautilus SVG renderer seems kind of incomplete in one way or another. SVG images that works in Sodipodi, Adobe viewer, Illustrator and Mozilla SVG, renders incorrectly in Nautilus. Wrong colours, missing gradients.

          And, Scalable Gorilla isn't an example, it is the only SVG theme available. A very nice looking theme though. :)

  • See also XForms (Score:5, Informative)

    by leighklotz ( 192300 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @02:57AM (#4684182) Homepage
    See also W3C XForms [w3.org], which has just become a Candidate Recommendation [w3.org] (one step before PR). XForms updates HTML forms to be XML-based, and plays well with other standards, adding forms to SVG and other XML applications. There are already about a dozen XForms implementations, ranging from those for hand-held devices to standalone clients and popular browser plug-ins. (And a Bugzilla entry for Mozilla that is entertaining reading, though a link from Slashdot won't work anyway.)

    Disclaimer: I am one of the editors of the XForms spec.

    • Re:See also XForms (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There are already about a dozen XForms implementations, ranging from those for hand-held devices to standalone clients and popular browser plug-ins

      How many of these implementations support the UPLOAD form control?

      Why do you expect browser authors to implement XForms when they don't even implement the ACCEPT attribute of HTML's INPUT TYPE=FILE element?

      Disclaimer: I worked on XForms for most of 1999.

  • Quick Info (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I heard that Redhat is planning to embedd librSVG (depends on some GNOME libraries) and GTK+ natively into XFree. Soon we have one standard Desktop on Linux, no halfassed things like XFree with bad Athena widgets and crappy configuration. We will get a complete reworked XFree with GTK+/GNOME support and new standards of libraries. You can read more about the plans on either the Redhat Mailinglists or the XFree development lists. A couple of GNOME developers are working on it already.

    • Re:Quick Info (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I heard that Redhat is planning to embedd librSVG...natively into XFree



      • 1. It's not RedHat, it's a former SuSE employee;
      • 2. it's a server extension;
      • 3. it's not SVG, although it can be used for rendering SVG. Or PDF. Or PostScript. Or whatever.

    • Bad idea. Very bad idea. That's not what XFree86 is for. Plus, making it dependent upon GNOME is seriously jacked.

    • Re:Quick Info (Score:4, Informative)

      by KeyserDK ( 301544 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @05:25AM (#4684595) Homepage
      This guy is clueless beyond imagination.. Anyway..

      The Xfree86 stuff he is getting riled up about is probably this [xfree86.org]
      While the gnome/gtk stuff is here [gnome.org] and here [gnome.org]
      How he mixed it together is - impressive.

  • SVG (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:02AM (#4684203)
    SVG is Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG is made in XML. It is easy to generate SVG. It is easy to export SVG. You can use SVG over the web like flash. You can use SVG to provide nice pretty scalable interfaces to web apps. SVG is more constrained and controlled than HTML. There is less likelyhood of incompatible features.

    http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8

  • Linux implementations (Score:5, Interesting)

    by raju ( 225812 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:12AM (#4684246) Homepage
    The first place I would expect SVG to appear in is the browser. In Mozilla [mozilla.org] the beta SVG provided by Adobe does not work. Mozilla's own implementation [mozilla.org][mozilla.org] is stuck due to licensing issues (LGPL vs MPL). When can we expect a decent one on our beloved platform? Windows users at least a decent one from Adobe.

  • So is this going to replace Flash? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:19AM (#4684270) Journal
    Flash is the dominant method used for interactive graphics on the web today. Websites, adverts, those little games, all have standardized on Flash. In fact although I wouldn't mind it, I can't picture the internet without Flash anymore.

    So my question as a non-developer is can SVG do everything Flash can? I didn't see anything about audio capabilities. Also does anyone think even if it can, are the tools there to make using SVG as good as the tools for making Flash graphics. Lastly is SVG a good working spec that won't be co-opted and ruined by some big company.

    • Re:So is this going to replace Flash? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:32AM (#4684316) Homepage Journal
      SVG isn't going to replace Flash anymore than Flash is going to replace binary games (i.e. We're not going to play Doom 3 as a Flash game): Each has its place. Having said that, in some situations SVG will supplant Flash were it's a better choice: For instance for charts and graphs the vector graphics capabilities of SVG are absolutely first-rate, and it's unnecessary to resort to a proprietary tool such as Flash when dynamically generated XML will work stunningly. The SVG standard is extremely comprehensive even in its 1.0 form, so I don't see very many ways that it can be coopted by anyone.

      • SVG isn't going to replace Flash anymore than Flash is going to replace binary games (i.e. We're not going to play Doom 3 as a Flash game): Each has its place.

        What's Flash's natural place? Why couldn't SVG evolve to replace it?

        • SVG is a vector graphics standards with dynamic DOM style elements intended to work in concert with other W3C web standards. It isn't intended to be a super, all-encompassing multimedia solution, as Flash strives for. Don't get me wrong here: I personally find that about 98% of the uses of Flash on the web are absolutely atrocious, and represent pure arrogance and ignorance of some web developers ("look at how COOL my intro page is! Look scrolling text! Techno music!"). However I truly believe that Flash and SVG are targeting separate uses and markets.

          • SVG is a vector graphics standards with dynamic DOM style elements intended to work in concert with other W3C web standards. It isn't intended to be a super, all-encompassing multimedia solution, as Flash strives for.

            SVG works in concert with a language called "Simple Multimedia Integration Languge" which does allow the integration of various media types into an "all-encompassing multimedia solution." When you combine the stack of W3C standards and extrapolate it does look to me like the set is on target to replace Flash.

            • By the same token SVG works in concert with HTML, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to say that SVG therefore is looking to replace Adobe Acrobat (though the complete solution may very well). SVG is a vector graphic addition to the standards compilation, basically, and while using it in concert with other standards allows for a Flash "like" solution, SVG fills a vector graphic gap in the web technology grab bag.

              • By the same token SVG works in concert with HTML, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to say that SVG therefore is looking to replace Adobe Acrobat (though the complete solution may very well).

                You are incorrect. There is a working group for SVG-in-print that is looking at SVG fulfilling tasks that overlap heavily with PDF.

                SVG is a vector graphic addition to the standards compilation, basically, and while using it in concert with other standards allows for a Flash "like" solution, SVG fills a vector graphic gap in the web technology grab bag.

                Fine. The point is that the emerging stack could add up to a competitor to Flash so that Flash would be replaced as various hypertext formats were replaced by HTML and its associated standards.

    • http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/samples.html

    • Re:So is this going to replace Flash? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:37AM (#4684334)
      The big difference between SVG and Flash is that SVG is an open specification, not one which is the property of a big company, Macromedia. Although there's never a guarantee that a big company will ruin its specification (HTML by Microsoft for example), it is not likely. SVG itself doesn't have audio capabilities, but SMIL has. In SVG you can incorporate SMIL to use audio. SVG has also some problems. It's XML, so it's text. This means that it can be quite a lot of data you have to send over the net. Or you can compress it (only zipping method which is supported by the 1.0 recommendation is gzip, this can have change), but then it should be decompressed. After this has been done, it should be parsed by the SVG viewer (like adobe's). Although there's still more support for SVG, there aren't much viewers available for SVG in browsers. Even Adobe's viewer [adobe.com] hasn't been updated in a year! But on the longer term I'm sure SVG will be much larger than Flash. Macromedia was keen enough to jump in the hole when there was need for vector graphics. SVG came too late to make it as successfull as Flash instantly. I think the fact that Macromedia owns Flash, while SVG is an open, public standard, will make the difference.
      • Again, SWF is an 'Open Standard' hence the php implementations, perl libs, etc. Macromedia only sells the premiere 'Authoring Tool' aka Flash. OSS could implement such a thing and could improve upon it by incorporating more robust scripting support.

        Well they could if they wanted to but most coders think SWF is demon-spawn.

      • SVG has also some problems. It's XML, so it's text. This means that it can be quite a lot of data you have to send over the net.

        Don't assume that text is necessarily a negative here - I'm working on a project right now where this is a key attribute arguing for SVG: Because it's text-based, SVG is a usable option for very simple, stupid embedded web devices. This allows temperature graphs or controls to be easily created by tiny 8-bit embedded microcontrollers, something that's not really computationally practical with Flash's computationally bloated binary format.

        Not everything connected to the Internet is a PC. In fact we're rapidly approaching the point where most of the interesting things on the net won't be PCs. SVG can be very good for those, and it's status as a true web standard makes it a far better choice than Flash as a long-term investment.

    • SVG vs. Flash (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cheese Cracker ( 615402 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:48AM (#4684359)
      Here's a great page that compares SVG vs. Flash [carto.net].

      Here's two good reasons why you want to implement SVG instead of Flash:

      SVG is a standard, Flash is proprietary.
      SVG can be indexed and searched, Flash can't.

      • Re:SVG vs. Flash (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tshak ( 173364 )
        Here's one good reason why you'd want to implement Flash instead of SVG: SVG is Slooow.

        Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited about the possibilities for quick and _relatively static_ XML based graphic generation. But for an extremely slow animation SVG hogs my CPU @100% on an Athlon 1.2Ghz.

        • Re:SVG vs. Flash (Score:5, Informative)

          by Khalid ( 31037 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @05:52AM (#4684689) Homepage
          > Here's one good reason why you'd want to implement Flash instead of SVG: SVG is Slooow.

          I am not sure what this really means. This is like saying XML is slow, or better HTML is slow. SVG is a standard, you will have slow, and quick implementations, maybe current implementation have not been really optimised yet, but there is no real reason SVG might be intrinscly slow
          • This is like saying XML is slow.

            Well, it is, and that's what I'm saying. XML is slow. Don't get me wrong, I use XML all the time - just not to generate animated vector graphics. Binary will always win on the performance front, and intensive graphics applications still need all the performance that it can get.

        • Re:SVG vs. Flash (Score:4, Interesting)

          by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @07:30AM (#4684869)
          You mean Flash isn't slow? The Flash plugin it takes 10 to 20 seconds to load, and when it's finally loaded, it hogs 90-100% CPU! And I'm using an Athlon 1.4 Ghz.

          • Re:SVG vs. Flash (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            10 to 20 seconds to load? Something must be wrong with your system cause it shouldn't take that long. Now the movies can take forever to load because a lot of people make bad flash movies.
      • Flash has Radiskull and Homestar Runner [homestarrunner.com] firmly in its camp. SVG doesn't.

        Oh, and the SWF format is an open standard.
      • Here's two good reasons why you want to implement SVG instead of Flash:

        SVG is a standard, Flash is proprietary.
        SVG can be indexed and searched, Flash can't.

        Man I don't know spit about Flash or SVG and I didn't read your link but I'm willing to bet that SVG couldn't touch Flash with a 10 foot pole.
    • SVG is getting wide adoption in mapping technologies. I used it to implement a selectable, zoomable map at work a few weeks ago. The XML base of it made it a lot easier than working with Flash would have been.
    • SVG doesn't have audio capabilities because audio isn't, well, vector graphics. You can add audio, though, by using SMIL [w3.org], another W3C standard. Or you can once someone supports SMIL. (RealPlayer supports SMIL, but AFAIK not SVG.) I suppose you could also probably use some JavaScript stuff to get audio.
  • Any unix apps around that will let you do interesting things with svgs? Like, VIEW them even? Why no mozilla support, even though a freely available implementation has been available since May 2001? [gnome.org]

    SVG looks uber-cool, but there doesn't seem to be much supporting software.

  • Let's not get ahead of ourselves here... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DraconPern ( 521756 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @03:34AM (#4684321) Homepage
    It's good that a new recommendation is coming out, but people are still trying to get SVG 1.0 right.

    For example, try http://www.croczilla.com/svg with your stock IE, mozilla or netscape 6. It doesn't work.

    Adobe has an example to show their attempt at http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/css_layout which only works in IE. But it takes up more CPU power to fade a new squares than flash does.

    I am not sure if the world is ready for 1.0 much less 1.1.
    • I agree SVG needs to be embedded in the VRAM chipset the way that OpenGL has been. It is every bit as process intensive via multiple matrix transformations albeit in a 2D space. So who want to start writing the OSS SVG GPU drivers?

      Barring that SVG needs more than a browser 'plugin'.

    • At first sight, this a great comment. Why add all those new features if SVG 1.0 is not implemented 100% ?

      But then reality strikes. SVG 1.1 adds not a single new attribute, element or method. It modularises SVG 1.0, is all.

      SVG Tiny and SVG Mobile are profiles (subsets) of SVG. They are mainly intended for the Mobile industry - SVG Tiny on cellphones, SVG Basic on PDAs. And there are five Tiny and three basic implementations that I am aware of.

      But these profiles also give a series of steps that new SVG implementations can take in turn. Instead of releasing a first version of an implementation that implements some random selection of features based on change or best guesses, a first implementation can go for SVG Tiny. Then in the next version it can add stuff like gradients and opacity and scripting and go for SVG Basic before finally biting off the rest of the stuff like complex filters andf going for SVG 1.1 Full, which is the exact same as SVG 1.0

      So, the first step in not getting ahead of ourselves is to take a glance at the actual specs before commenting ....

      About the CPU power - in the SWF format from macromedia, there is a fixed frame rate. So, your desktop gives you only that framerate (though it could do better) and the high end PDA gives you that framerate and the low end PDA or cellphone would presumably curl up in smoke or dump core or take eight times as long to play it in agonising slomo, or something. In SVG, the animation is declarative so you can play it at the best framerate that your device can give (like video games, the better your machine the smoother the animation).

      There does need to be some way to throttle back the animation though, I agree, just like the difference in a video game between 100fps and 500fps would be better spent doing something else.

  • I would give anything to go back to the html... All those new features... I would like to see html 2.0 and tables and that's it! People don't need anything else to put stuff on the web... Now you got all that fancy stuff, flash,... animateg gifs (ok, those could be tolerated) and all those things that make your browser choke and spit...

    Use those 'new' shinny stuff somewhere else... We need something simple... I know that html alone is simple, but do we really need so many extension to it? Graphics, scripts, animations, whoknowswhatelse, FSCK! I need something that I can use to read HOWTO's and FAQ's and sometimes /.

    Ah well.. I'll go back to bed.. feverish again.... ;)
    • While you're at it why don't you throw out the computer and just handwrite all your snail mail and take three week trips to visit a museum somewhere. Turn on talk radio and live it up with out those 'fancy' moving pictures we call TV. I love reading a good book as much as the next guy but i also appreciate a well thought out (key), GUI that expedites my acquistion of knowledge and or goods.

      Besides HTML is ugly.
      • Ah, but you missed the point... HTML was created to present the same content on multiple platforms and different kinds of user agents (try SVG or Flash on Braille terminal) and now it's everything except that...

        True, it could be what it wanted to be, but it is not, blame the creators that don't write proper code, blame the useragents that don't render the code correctly... It doesn't matter it is not what was supposed to be...

        And BTW, TV and Radio both successfully deliver news to me... Some flashy web page fails to do that, because I simply close the damned thing... Oh and with TV, you can still turn off the picture and just listen to it, most of the time, if you turn off Flash you will lose like 95% of the functionality... Which sucks...

    • Hey listen, buddy! Some of us have diagrams, charts and equations we'd like to display. At the moment I have to do that by having HTML with hundreds of little graphics inlined everywhere I use a math symbol or anything else that's not text. I would give anything to go to SVG. So would readers of papers on my website, both humans and spiders.
    • Heh. You'll like XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2.0 only deals with the markup of information for contextual representation. Paragraphs, lists, lines, links, and tables. Oh, and objects <img /> has been banished. All the presentational stuff is done with CSS. Check out the W3C's core stylesheets project. The object tag allows you to fall-through to the least-prefered format for an information object svg->flash->png->gif->text, if you like. Neat stuff.

  • SVG VS FLASH (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SVG can do more than flash. The only reason why everyone is not using SVG right now is because there are no "flash like" tools. SVG doesn't need to be "frame" bound like flash and has a better scripting language than flash (emcascript or javascript).

    So SVG is better than flash, will be better than flash but currently it's tools are immature to compete head to head with flash but for instance if Macromedia was smart they'd provide SVG exporting of their flash stuff s.t they won't be thrown out of the market due to a new file format. Oh and don't trust the whack jobs supporting that PHP swf file format thing. That's a dead end, it's time to rely on something open.

    • Re:SVG VS FLASH (Score:3, Interesting)

      by foniksonik ( 573572 )
      Flashscript is no longer the end-all be-all for swf format. FlashRemote supports many server side languages and has excellent support for XML and SQL.

      I have been intrigued by SVG ever since it made it's appearance on the scene but the SVG guys seriouly need to make a leg and get moving on authoring tools which support the full gamut of capabilities, ie: this hand coding crap just won't fly in a work flow process or even for JoeAverage doing something for school.

      Anyways Adobe has an SVG plugin and you can export any vector + variables + code from illustrator and GoLive as SVG. Still not an authoring tool like Flash though. Macromedia bought and innovated their way to the top of multimedia authoring a while ago and Adobe is still playing catch up in a lot of ways (coming along nicely though).

  • SVG Plugin from Corel (Score:2, Informative)

    by schepers ( 462428 )
    Last week, Corel announced a preview plugin [corel.com] (Windows only, for now), so Adobe isn't the only game in town.
    They also have a gallery with some neat SVG samples [corel.com].

  • SVG + script = Enterprise web app (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wombatmobile ( 623057 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @04:46AM (#4684512)
    An SVG document can be UI for enterprise applications integration.

    For example, start with this static picture [svgmaker.com] generated from a CAD program.

    add some simple polygons and script them to conform with some business logic. Connect to your enterprise applications and databases using various connectors (simulated here) and you get a UI component like this [svgmaker.com] that integrates with HTML.

    Click on components to select them.

    Ctrl-Click to select a set of components. Move your mouse over the colored components to highlight data in the html table.

    Type a number in at the top right [enter] to see if you have enough components available for manufacturing.

    This example was coded by hand in a day and a half. Probably could do another one in 3 hours or so now we got the hang of it.

  • I had heard some rumors that SVG contained patented technology with which some organization was not going to play nice. Is this true? Or is SVG royalty-free?

    • The thing with rumours is that, like sex, you should check past history before sharing with someone new.

      Short verson SVG is Royalty Free

      Longer verson SVG is Royalty Free and here is why ...

      The SVG Working group is chartered to be a Royalty Free working group. It was the first one at W3C, in fact. That did mean, though, that we asked all members of the working group for their license terms on patents that they might not even know they had ;-) which scared some people at the time of the Big RAND Wars which slashdotters will remember ... its seems that reading "company X has US patent 12345 and gives the following royalty free license" or "company Y has no patents and gives a RAND license to them" etc was too confusing.

      So we simplified and clarified. In the SVG 1.1 [w3.org] and Mobile SVG [w3.org] specs you will find a link fromthe 'Status of this Document' to the patent page [w3.org]. There is one patent number there, from Kodak, along with a legal statement from Kodak that it is not needed for implementing SVG. We still have to tell people about it, of course, since they told us.

      So yes, SVG is Royalty Free

  • Sorry, I got the URL wrong for Hugh Enxing's magnificent airport management example.

    It is really here [65.242.180.4].

    This is so good!

  • Like PDF but its XML (Score:5, Informative)

    by wombatmobile ( 623057 ) on Saturday November 16, 2002 @06:01AM (#4684709)
    SVG is an image format that can faithfully reproduce a document display context, same like PDF but since SVG is XML you can mark it up by hand in a text editor, script it, transform it, integrate it directly with HTML or whatever you like. And no monopoly controls it.

    This is a shameless plug but we are only 5 guys working out of a house, not a monopoly... (yet... ho ho ho). In the same way that Acrobat can generate PDF out of anything, SVGmaker [svgmaker.com] can generate SVG out of Windows apps.

    These are examples [svgmaker.com].

    • What you're doing is great! Good for you!

      But...

      you can mark it up by hand in a text editor
      Well, the last thing I'd normally want to do is create a drawing by marking it up in text using an editor. That's what drawing software is for. This is a little like complaining that ELF is a bad format because it's not easily editable. The way I produce PDF is by converting editable versions (EPS and TeX) into PDF. The way you produce ELF files is by converting the editable version (C) into ELF.

      And no monopoly controls it.
      Well, PDF is much better supported in open-source software than SVG is. I can click on a PDF hyperlink in Mozilla, and it displays it for me. I can produce PDF from TeX source code using pdftex.

      Anyhow, isn't the whole comparison inappropriate? PDF is meant for articles, books, and so on.

  • It's great that SVG is XML based and supports scripting and such. Question is, what will be done in terms of security?
  • SVG is a better standard than Flash because it's text based and much easier to manipulate. However, Flash has the authoring tools that web designers use and it ships with almost every browser, whether you want it or not.

    The lack of authoring tools for SVG may actually turn out to be an advantage. People doing Flash seem to be mostly using it for things that are very annoying to users, and they are often not doing it very well (that flashing, blinking web interface doesn't resize, for example). SVG may turn out to be a better and more acceptable format for vector graphics than Flash precisely because the people who shouldn't use it don't know how to anyway (of course, that blessed state will not last long--if it catches on, Macromedia will output SVG, too).

    But until SVG becomes supported out of the box, with no plugins, by IE and Mozilla, it won't catch on much. Microsoft may support SVG in IE just to spite Macromedia--let's hope so. But it is incomprehensible to me why Mozilla has been so slow to offer SVG support: it already has all the XML parsing and graphics primitives built in--why is SVG support so difficult?

    • SVG actually is supported quite nicely in mozilla. It's not on in the default builds, though, due to licensing issues with the libart library. (It's LGPL only, Moz is MPL/GPL/LGPL)

    • SVG support has been a difficult issue in Mozilla because of the rich canvas. As you say, the XML parser and DOM and CSS parser and inheritance and XLink simple linking and JPEG and PNG and ECMAscript are there already.

      The Mozilla SVG project [mozilla.org] started off by using Raph Levien's rendering library libart [gnome.org], which is only licensed to be used under the terms of the LGPL and not the standard Mozilla MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license.

      So, that licensing issue held up getting SVG code into the trunk, and when it was in ther trunk, stopped it being in the core builds (it was there in CVS and could be enabled at compile time). It worked on Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc - it was very cross platform code but there was the licensing issue.

      A new approach is to split the rendering code into platform-independent and platform-dependent parts. A test of this approach is available from the croczilla [croczilla.com] site (which has a bunch of great examples too) - there is a build that uses the GDI+ renderer suplied with Windows 2000/XP. Clearly, this avoids the license issue o the rendering library and clearly, it means there needs to be a separate platform layer for each supported OS (darwin on MacOS X, perhaps different linux layers for Gnome or KDE, etc)

      I know the Netscape folks are aware of this, too, because I visited Netscape and gave them a demo which included Mozilla SVG among other things.

  • I hope my new iBook never gets infested (when i get it).
  • Everyone is talking about how SVG makes for a nice interactive site and will replace Flash/etc. as a nice defined standard. But what about audio? I didnt' see it mentioned in the specs... Of course SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, but what will be done to handle synchronized audio on a web site? Will the old DOM and JavaScript take care of this? What about if I want an SVG-pure page?

    Or am I missing something blatantly obvious in the specs?
    • Browsers already know how to handle audio tags...

      See here [protocol7.com] for an SVG pong game that uses audio.
    • SVG 1.1 is just a modularized version of SVG 1.1, so that the SVG Tinad SVG Basic profiles can be built. It does not add new features.

      The first working draft of SVG 1.2 was also released today, and asks for feedback about including audio:
      http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG12/#SMIL

      There are already SVG implementatons that have experimental ausio support in their own namespace, for example the Adobe viewer and the CSIRO PocketPC viewer, so that prototypes one way to do it (as an audio element to SVG)

      <audio xlink:href="whatever" volume="50">

      XSmiles shows a different approach - use SMIL and SVG each in their own naespace.

      Feedback on which methodis best would be welcome, to

      mailto:www-svg@w3.org

      actually deciding to include audio, one way or another is easy, everyone wants that, its a question of what syntax to use.

      The other issue is the format. In SVG, unlike HTML, there are required formats on the image element - JPEG, PNG, and SVG itself of course. For audio, should we

      - require one particular format
      - require several formats
      - not say anything

      the issue being that the most popular format, MP3, is not royalty free. Ogg Vorbis is an option, but not all platforms support that and for mobile, there is not really room to add audio code. The SVG mobile players will likely just use an operating system call to do that. So, its a tricky decision.

  • There is a php library for building W3C 1.0 documents at phpHtmllib.newsblob.com [slashdot.org]

    It currently supports building W3C SVG 1.0 compliant "images", as well as fully compliant XML/HTML/XHTML and WML documents and complex html 'widgets'.

  • for OS X (Score:2, Informative)

    by sbwoodside ( 134679 )
    Here's an SVG view for Mac OS X:

    http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_u ti lities/adobesvgviewer.html
  • I've been looking for something like this for a long time -- a vector graphics format that's an open standard, cross platform, with easy to use tools (preferably free), etc.

    I do a lot of technical writing and mechanical engineering stuff. I've long needed a graphics format where I can send anything from a quick sketch to a CAD drawing via email or whatever, and have anyone be able to read it clearly, on any system. Bitmap formats are too big and too jaggy, terrible for line drawings. Flash can only be created on Windows or Mac. SVG solves these problems. It's great to see it coming along so well.

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