WVG : The New Scalable Vector Graphics 432
jafro_svg writes "While the press has discussed Microsoft's upcoming 'Sparkle' as a potential Flash-killer - the technology arena on which Microsoft's new technology is having the most impact is SVG. SVG (now a W3 standard for 3 yeras) was itself billed as a Flash-killer some years ago, and speculation about how it might be accepted into the mainstream for developers (i.e. incorporated into IE) now seems inevitable -- you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG." Jafro_svg also points out this online SVG tutorial.
Can't surpass flash. (Score:1, Insightful)
These days, you see flash taking the place of all client-side drawing, from games to its intended use of vector animation to entire layouts for websites. Flash
has evolved past simple vector drawings and is now, unfortunately, a part of the Internet that will probably be here to stay, with its annoying audio and annoying ads.
Even if it is incorporated into IE, web developers will see no reason to switch
to this new technology. Microsoft often reserves new initiatives for higher versions of Internet Explorer and leaves the older users in the dust, telling them to upgrade. With such a wide majority of users reluctant to upgrade, it'd be kind of pointless for webmasters to use this instead of flash.
Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)
For reference, see Minidisc, laserdisc, Apple, and Linux...
New replacement for flash! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:1, Insightful)
A consideration... (Score:3, Insightful)
In most cases, Flash is abused by people who think it adds pizazz to menus or advertisements anyway. 99% of us would get along better without unless we're watching a cartoon or playing a game in it.
Deja Vu.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sound familiar to anyone?
Anyone remember MS Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG.
Funny how Microsoft never manages complete compliance with a standard. How does it go again? Oh yes: embrace, extend, cripple, discard. Repeat ad nauseam.
So... (Score:1, Insightful)
Communication and data exchange protocols ought to be open standards by law, damnit!
what? (Score:2, Insightful)
This being a standard in browsers will be a hard-to-come-by thing. Although it appears to have W3C standards, everybody seems to have their own little ways to distort the standards.
Plus, vector graphics in flash load fast anyway. Have you ever seen a (well-designed) flash banner slow your page load?
Come on, people! Flash-killer? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Flash really was replaced by WVG, do you know what the result would be? It's simple: Flash would be replaced by WVG. Instead of everyone complaining about the annoying Flash ads and site designs, we'd be complaining about the annoying WVG ads and site designs.
What's that you say? WVG won't support audio?[1] It won't be interactive like Flash[2], so there won't be any websites made entirely out of WVG? Then what on earth makes you think people will switch from Flash?
[1] I really have no idea whether WVG will support audio. If it will, my point is even stronger.[2] See [1].
Re:Can't surpass flash.-Naysayer-convention in tow (Score:2, Insightful)
The situation is completely different today. This is a foray into an already saturated market as Flash dominates the field and wipes the floor clean with the blood of its competitors.
The last 10% (Score:5, Insightful)
And Microsoft FrontPage and IE support a version of HTML that is 90% identical to W3C-compliant HTML. It's that last 10% that makes me want to throw my forehead through my monitor every day at the office.
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:5, Insightful)
Netscape lost out to IE
Apple lost out to Microsoft
AltaVista lost out to Google
WordPerfect lost out to Word
The typewriter lost out to the computer
Quark will eventually lose out to InDesign
In each example, the dominant, familiar, easy-to-use solution was replaced by the upstart.
Saying this 'can't surpass' Flash is so short-sighted and uninsightful it's making my teeth itch.
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:2, Insightful)
It will happen first through security updates, then the new release. Maybe installation of MSOffice or DirectX 10 will cause it. There will be rumors of a security hole in the flash player. Eventually it will be unavoidable, and designers will decide WVG is less trouble.
Some would call it modus operandi.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Is everyone really missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
'Sparkle' is a vector designed drawing engine for APPLICATIONS inside longhorn, it is NOT being billed as a WEB standard.
'Sparkle' is the transitional replacement of the GDI model of the Windows interface. Moving from a Bitmap model to a true Vector model for the Windows UI.
It has NOTHING to do with SVG, Flash, or Web standards.
If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.
The only reason the 'Sparkle' vector engine of Longhorn is getting buzz in this area is that unlike Quartz, it supports a wide array of animation standards within the vector drawing engine.
So, yes it functions somewhat like Flash of today, but that DOES NOT mean it is meant to replace Flash. Instead, it should be the new OS UI rendering engine that FLASH itself uses to draw FLASH applets in a browser window. (Get it, it is the vector engine under applications and things like Flash will use to render on screen.)
The same for SVG, there is no mention that SVG will not be supported in the new IE of Longhorn, in fact, SVG will probably be supported, but be drawn in the UI by the 'Sparkle' Engine.
This is an application/OS level vector rendering engine with animation, it is not a Web standard, nor does it purport to be.
Please stop with Microsoft is abandoning standards and trying to take over the world because they are moving their OS UI model from bitmap to vector based. That is all, get over it.
Everyone thought it was great stop forward in UI rendering models when Apple did this with Quartz, so how is Microsoft evil in developing their own rendering engine as well?
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:5, Insightful)
The coolest example I can point you to is this [w3.org]. An XSLT stylesheet is used to transform a chess markup language into a animated SVG image. Beyond cool.
Flash is backwards - MS are devious (Score:5, Insightful)
A cacheable (please!), dynamically generatable (without histrionics) SVG implementation is a much awaited flash killer if you ask me.
Unfortunately MS seems hell bent on taking an open standard, hacking it to bits, making it a "proprietary standard"(sic) and no longer inter-operable with the original standard, then deluging the market with a glut of installations... Eerily reminiscant of the good old JVM days...
Q.
Re:Damn Microsoft! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why o why does this company get to do this to the populous? An open standard, taken, broken in compatability, bundled into an already integrated browser in the most widespread desktop OS on the planet, to compete with a company with an existing product...
I thought MS couldn't leverage their monopoly on the desktop to compete with other technologies... and bundling WVG, to compete with flash, is clearly copetition.
Re:Yes but... (Score:2, Insightful)
the technology trash cycle is good for business, its called 'planned obsolecense' in the consumer goods industry. beyond that, its just a part of life and software evolution, regardless of who made the standard and to what end.
The Best Case for SVG - Maps (Score:2, Insightful)
For the past year and a half I've been working in spare time on fleshing out maps of Russia and the former Soviet Union republics, one map for each oblast/province. Check out either Mappoint [mappoint.com] or the equivalent views on Expedia [expedia.com]? At the detailed view, these are the most beautiful maps in the world, 100% better and more detailed than any National Geographic Atlas. But there's a catch. You can only see tiny little patches of the whole map at a time. Therefore, in order to see a detailed view of a whole oblast, you have to stitch together a quilting project, grid by grid along a north to south baseline, and then move across east and west, doing repeated screen shots and piecing the grid together carefully. One little hitch, though. As you move up and down and across the grid, the details change because of their ridiculous javascript-based map generating engine. Thus in one view of a grid you might see two villages; in the gridpoints three degrees west, they should still be there sitting on x:y coordinates by such-and-such river, but they are GONE! In other words, details get wiped out at the edges of the grid views.
If you are perseverant enough to stitch the whole together, taking into account rotations for each patch of the quilt as you move from the baseline east and west, you end up with a beautiful bit map view of the whole oblast, a collosal file size, and with lots of defects because of the problems along seam lines where the screenshots (the quilt patches) overlap. Along N/S grids, you can wipe out 20% of the villages, and even names of major cities (because of the problem of shifting positioning of text). File sizes make them all but useless for the publishing on the web (largest maps are upwards of 10 MB even when compressed to PDF).
The obvious solution is to remap all the topographic detail using SVG so that you end up with a seamless map showing the same detail level, down to villages and rivers, that has the whole oblast in one snapshot, zoomable down to the detail you need to see roads, railroads, and national parks. This would reside in a text file that is probably going to be large for some of the geographically large areas (Chukotia, Khabavarosk, Taymyr, Buryatia, etc.), but by comparison with bitmaps - tiny, and viewable in a browser. For detail areas, you add clickable links to city maps too. So, for example, if you want to look at Sverdlovsk oblast, you can click on Ekaterinburg or Nizhniy Tagil and zoom right down to a city map showing street names, monuments, parks, and other features.
This is where I see real potential of SVG on the web. At least, it's the project I'm working on for the foreseeable future, which will probably take me well into retirement years.
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:2, Insightful)
With Mosaic, and the new Netscape so popular (used in libraries and educational institutes), I fail to see how any other initiatives (even those backed by Microsoft) can manage to eat into the radical marketshare of Netscape.
These days, you see Netscape taking the place of Mosaic for all HTML rendering. Microsoft's internet explorer doesn't even support forms properly!
Even if it is incorporated into the operating system, web developers will see no reason to switch to this new browser. Microsoft often reserves new initiatives for newer versions of Windows, and leaves older versions in the dust, forcing people to upgrade. With such a wide majority of users reluctant to upgrade from windows 95 and NT4.0, it'ld be kinda pointless for webmasters to code for internet explorer instead of netscape.
<tongue>
Well that's how things were about 5 years ago.
Re:sigh. It's the pro microsoft troll again. (Score:5, Insightful)
And funny, I also write a lot of code for Linux. Makes you rethink how safe this whole Open Source thing is, ah?
Just kidding, although I do write a lot of things for Linux...
I abhor the lynching of any company when it isn't based on fact. Pick on Apple or Linux for the wrong reason, and you will get a response from me as well. However, Linux and Apple are seldom bashed at SlashDot or 20 people have already responded to defend them. Microsoft seems to be the kicking boy around here, and sometimes they deserve it, but not EVERY TIME.
I am no serious fan of any specific OS, I just want the competition to continue so that future OSes will be far beyond what is conceived and rambled on in many of these posts.
It amazes me that OS fans(especially here) get so complacent with what the current development cycles are producing and the lack of vision of what is around the corner.
Microsoft may be fools in a lot of regard, but they are not losing any R&D ground by being 'happy' with how things currently are with their OS.
Apple is also starting to lead innovation again after a 10 year dead cycle.
Solaris just keeps moving the old model forward, Linux is maturing, and the BSD variants are setting some security standards, but there is nothing revolutionary coming from these OS groups.
Where is the next thing? If I had to bet now, it will be from Microsoft or Apple - they at least get that catching up is not good enough, creating something that never existed before is the real brass ring.
Just like the 2.6 kernel, what is really great and new in it that doesn't exist already in some other OS already available? And it kills me that people are so 'happy' about what is new in the 2.6 kernel, like the new scheduler - other *nixes have had better schedulers for a long time; Linux is once again just catching up. Even the original NT kernel scheduler is more advanced than pre-2.6 Linux kernels.
It is time to take theories and start putting them into products, and then creating new OS theories and implementing them as well.
That is one of the few things Microsoft did do right with the NT project - take un-implemented OS theories and put them together in a cohesive OS model. Seems everyone is so busy hating them they have missed their angle that gives them the edge even today.
SVG could surpass Flash... (Score:5, Insightful)
While Mozilla is a great piece of work technically, the management can't be described anything other than moronic.
I am a supporter of free software and I also have several webpages.
That's why I have given up any hopes of Mozilla spearheading new technology. To do that you have to have some minimum of self-confidence which the Mozilla project lacks.
That's why Apple chose KHTML and not Gecko.
KDE 3.2 will come out in about a month and Konqueror will come with SVG support out of the box. IE will have something similar later. The sad fact is that Mozilla's minority complex is so big that they simply won't incorporate anything that isn't in other browsers in a usable form, so Mozilla users will have to wait for Konqueror to hope for a useful SVG-implementation in default-Mozilla.
There are so many things right in front of the noses of Mozilla maintainers that would make Mozilla a better browser and would introduce killer-features, that no other browsers support, yet they prefer to let those technologies rot unused and wait for other browsers to support it.
obfuscate open standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Typical embrace + extend (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla has SVG support for years. Sadly, Mozilla maintainers don't support it and don't put it into the default distribution.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
You do realize that one of the defining characteristics of monopolies is their implicit resistance to market demands (which is due to the lack of competition caused by barriers to market entry).
And remember that the medium you are currently using was designed by such a committee of tenured bureaucrats in 1989 (going with html proposal here, I know the choice is debatable) and has penetrated to the point where roughly 2/3 of the adult population has access to it at home. Yeah, obviously this rather dull group of people, er... tenured bureaucrats, wasn't able to develop a flexible, robust, and extensible solution.
Re:Is everyone really missing the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be wonderful in an ideal world, but SVG has MANY limitations that Longhorn WILL support. From animations and effects that SVG cannot handle.
Sure. Because it's PDF-based and PDF is a...wait for it...STANDARD.
PDF, Standard? Um... Ok, and who owns this standard, defines it, and 'licenses' it?
Oh wait, you surely didn't mean an 'Open Standard' did you?
Re:Anyone remember MS Java? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why it doesn't work under mozilla, I don't remember having tried it under windows. But the windows adobe plugin works under mozilla on linux, using Crossover. The only thing I can think of is if you have the SVG-enabled mozilla (which sucks), while trying to run the plugin too.
Try the usual things: moving the plugin DLL's from mozilla's plugin directory, reinstalling it, etc.
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Manufacturers were eager to jump on and support it because the costs of pressing a DVD are smaller than recording onto a giant spool of analog video tape. Stores were happy to stock them because they took up half the shelf space. This also saves the manufacturers a good deal on shipping costs. Consumers loved them because they were visibly higher quality, contained bonus features not practical to shove onto a VHS cassette, and took advantage of their audiophile gear. Everybody benefits.
This is not identical to relearning an art that has taken Flash gurus years to perfect, with relatively little improvement over the competing product.
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SVG could surpass Flash... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Mozilla project don't want to build SVG by default because it's not a full implementation of any current spec. It's missing a lot of features. They have been burned before by half supporting standards, and it's generally agreed that it's a bad thing. Either you support it, or you don't. You can't just support the easy bits, or the bits that sounded coolest.
While the KSVG team have been storming and may well have a full implementation, the same is not true of the Gecko implementation. If people cared enough about it, they'd work on Geckos version, but it seems they don't.
Re:Of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about formats, it's about IDEs (Score:3, Insightful)
If it weren't for the Flash IDE, Flash would be nowhere. If MS manages to build an IDE of simular ease-of-use to designers and alongside manages to actually implement true OOP in the underlying scripting of the technology, THEN there will be a Flashkiller.
Until then we'll have to live with this semi-proprietary technology, with the hip looking IDE frontend, the cool flash vector animations and the most crappy scripting object model ever concieved by the human mind. One that triples development time in comparsion to other technologies. Which is why we still hardly see serious webapps developed in Flash. Maybe that's even for the better.
Let's all just hope that MS fails as well, and that somehting like a OSS JMF IDE pops up to take over the reign of Flash. We'd finally have a client-webapp IDE that runs on Linux. That would be cool, wouldn't it?
Eolas may be the key (Score:1, Insightful)
Picture this:
The next release of IE has that stupid "fix" when running ActiveX in order to comply with the Eolas lawsuit settlement terms. Flash no longer "just runs" in webpages, but pops up a prompt to initiate the app. (Refer to previous articles on the Eolas VS Microsoft case for more accurate details).
IE being MS's own technology, MS comes up with a method of running Flash-like media, of their own format (Sparkle) in web pages that does not involve an annoying prompt, and which doesn't run afoul of Eolas' patent.
Bingo. Flash is now crippled, and the viable alternative is Sparkle. And MS can deflect any blame to Eolas. Now you know why MS didn't just license Eolas' damn patent!