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.
Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
How to make XML 40% smaller (Score:0, Interesting)
i.e., <a_ridiculously_long_tag_name><BLINK> hello</>there</>
About time... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's funny how some things turn out. Two years ago I was doing some research for a software company (they made CAD software adapted for ship design with lots of extra features) who wanted to put their product tutorials online and create a feedback system. The idea was that they wouldn't have to spend so much time teaching users how to use their software.
Anyway, I was looking at designing interactive websites and had to investigate a whole lot of new technologies, SVG among them. I found a few really cool examples, but nothing really useful. I also concluded at that time that it would be too hard to get SVG working in the users' browsers (Netscape 6.0 had just come out - it supposedly supported SVG, but damned if I could get it to work properly). Also, no one else was really using SVG at the time.
So in the end we went with Flash - not for the site design, but for interactive physics examples that helped the user to understand why different design decisions gave their ships different properties. Now that SVG (or the MS version) is being incorporated in IE, I could see it being useful for these type of things. Of course, there is the little matter of Flash being well understood by developers who've got lots of experience, and the large installed userbase... Will be interesting to see what is being used in another few years.
Re:So... (Score:2, Interesting)
Communication and data exchange protocols ought to be open standards by law, damnit!
Don't you really mean -- there should be one protocol for everything, decided by the diktat of law, read tenured bureaucrats?
We've gone down that route before, with CDE, SGML, X.509 and the 7-layer OSI model. Thanks, but I'll take a Microsoft standard, which at least is answerable to market forces; over stuff published by unimaginative committees anyday.
An interesting little race. (Score:4, Interesting)
What is somewhat interesting is that, at least in this (very early stage) MS is claiming that this is the new basis for all their UI drawing - the often suggested "totally SVG interface" that has been bandied about on Slashdot. And to be fair, things are starting to head that way. GNOME and KDE already do SVG icons etc. So the next question is, how quickly is the FOSS community going to have something like this already implemented, because they seem to have a head start ATM (though no direct push as MS has). And when it is implemented, how similar/compatile will the implementations be...
We shall see.
Jedidiah.
Flash has a place (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:3, Interesting)
I will come bundled with every copy of Frontpage/Office/Windows...the same way that IE beat Netscape.
Re:Anyone remember MS Java? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can't surpass flash. (Score:1, Interesting)
Remember Windows Media Player version 6? Microsoft stopped making codecs for it. There were tools to convert movie files to the new format that v6 couldn't play, but v7 could play. I don't remember v6 being able to play asf files at all. So you upgrade to v7 and all of a sudden you have to worry about whether it's transmitting a unique ID number to websites when you stream a movie. It was also able to execute scripts embedded in ASF files.
Microsoft doesn't break old technology because they don't have to. They don't update their old technologies; they replace them with new technologies.
Re:So... (Score:1, Interesting)
Considering that my hand-created files validate against the XSDs provided, I'll ask you to tell me how they're `incomplete'.
I'm all for market forces chosing the best standard, which is why I am against large companies using their dominance of the software market to lock customers in to a propriety method of data exchange.
Flash isn't a public standard either. It is certainly documented, though. So will WVG by the time it's finished. SVG *is* a public standard, and various Open Source GUIs are using it.
So, I look at the market and I see:
- a proprietary, entrenched documented de-facto standard (Flash) pushed by a big-ass company.
- a public, up-and-coming standard (SVG) pushed by groups whose overall market share is minuscule but promises to rise because it is Free
- a proprietary, forming protocol pushed by a bigger ass company
I don't see what's to be afraid of, if I were Macromedia: if WVG takes off, their Flash creator would spit out WVG in addition to Flash. Ditto Adobe's vector design tools -- and both companies would make money either way (and remember, right now, both Adobe and Macromedia make money on the tools) because Microsoft's design tools suck.
In fact, with WVG, the market *demand* for design tools will go up, resulting in a windfall for both companies. Visual Studio 2005 will have some design tools for animation, but it'll be strictly windows-movie-maker-caliber, and any serious dev team will have to hire graphic designers into the team or learn a significant amount of Macromedia Director.
Now, if I was a GNOME fan, I wouldn't be worried either -- after all, SVG delivers at least 99%+ of WVG's functionality.
In short, you're whining and you know it
Btw, here's the one-paragraph-explanation of why WVG was chosen over SVG, as understood by me from dev presentations: WVG's DOM is designed to easily represented using a common format using both declarative (e.g. XAML) and procedural/OO (e.g. C#, VB) models. It was not a question of not using SVG, but rather that SVG was not suited for the design goals the Avalon team had -- i.e., a unified programming model for creating GUIs on the web and on the desktop.
Re:Is everyone really missing the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if you actually read anything about Longhorn, you would know that there is no difference between a native app and a web app in Longhorn. IE will support avalon rendering, so if you go to a website that uses MS's proprietary document/app format, you WILL see a Sparkle rendered page.
Scary...
Re:SVG could surpass Flash... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not saying Mozilla can't be used by anyone other than a geek (my wife uses Mozilla as much as I do) but we would all benefit if some of the developers/maintainers could take their heads out of the sand.
Re:Anyone remember MS Java? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is everyone really missing the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that why Microsoft calls it a "Flash killer"? Is that why it is 90%, but not 100%, identical to SVG?
Of course it has something to do with SVG, Flash, and 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.
That's because it doesn't matter what Apple does--they don't have enough marketshare. Furthermore, it would be pointless to tell Apple that Quartz is a bad design because they would never in a million years listen anyway--they are way too arrogant.
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?
No, not "everyone" thought it was great. The usual Apple cheering squad thought it was great. But they would think it was great if Apple shipped severed cow heads on sticks and called them computers.
It's not even that supporting something like SVG in the display server is itself such a horrible idea--for a limited range of applications. But if you are going to do stored vector graphics in the server, either pick a standard format (100% SVG) or pick a decently designed format (PDF does not qualify). True to form, Microsoft and Apple got it both wrong, though in different ways.
SVG for defining cursors in CSS (Score:3, Interesting)
One interesting use for SVG is the ability to define cursors [w3.org] in CSS level 2 revision 1 [w3.org] documents. You simply set your CSS cursor parameter so that it points to the URI of the SVG file which contains an SVG cursor definition. Although certainly not the most important use for SVG, it is still useful and worth noting. I can imagine that in the future there will be loads of web sites with all kinds of obnoxious cursors.
Why Adobe's SVG doesn't work in Mozilla any more (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe's SVG viewer used to work in Mozilla on Linux, but not it no longer works, in post-0.99 version of Mozilla. Not because Adobe broke it, but because they trusted Mozilla enough to use one of their "unsupported" XP-COM interfaces, which Mozilla changed. [See Mozilla bug number 133567.]
Granted, Mozilla had warned Adobe that they might change the interfaces, which were not yet frozen. But Mozilla broke their side of the contract by neglecting to change the UUID of the interface, when they changed a method signature, which should be Standard Operating Procedure.
The whole point of using XP-COM (which is the COM-like plug-in system that Mozilla uses) is to protect against things like this happening. But Mozilla didn't play by the rules, and screwed Adobe after they'd already released their SVG viewer plug-in.
So everyone is screwed because Adobe's SVG viewer USED to run on Mozilla on Linux and Windows, but NOT ANY MORE. Mozilla's built-in SVG support is impressive and commendable and going in the right direction, but nowhere near enough to fill the void left behind when AdobeSVG just stopped working one day.
Mozilla moved the bug that ASVG crashes mozilla to "Evangelism", so now the ball's in Adobe's court to decide if they'll trust the Mozilla project again after having been burnt. Of course it was the Mozilla project's Overenthusiastic Evangelism that convinced Adobe to use the early plug-in interface in the first place. You have to appreciate the irony of fighting fire with fire.
In the perfect world, Adobe would have released a fix for this problem soon after the it was "Evangelized" to their attention. And I would like a pony with that. But in the real world, they're off on the next version of their SVG viewer, and don't want to think about the old version. You can get a beta of the new version for Windows, but it's unstable, and not supported on any other platform than Windows.
But if you're using Linux and want to use Adobe's SVG viewer, you have to sit around and wait, hoping that Adobe will get around to releasing the next version of their SVG viewer, and when they do it will support Linux. But there are no guarentees. The original SVG viewer for Linux was only released as beta, never officially released. And Adobe's been said to be back-pedaling on SVG and concentrating on other products.
Batik would be usable as an SVG viewer plug-in (not as efficient but almost as functional where it counts), but I haven't been able to get past the Java security restrictions to enable the ecmascript interpreter (rhino). Batik packaged as an SVG viewer browser applet (in a way that rhino worked, enabling dynamic svg) would go a long way towards rendering Adobe's proprietary SVG viewer irrelevant. But I haven't been able to figure out how to get rhino to work in an applet, or find any examples of Batik running in an applet as an interactive SVG viewer. Squiggle is not what I mean by an applet.
If anyone from Adobe is reading, and actually cares about SVG: When will the next version of Adobe's SVG viewer come out, and will it support Mozilla, Linux and Mac OS/X, as well as Windows and Internet Explorer? Or has Abobe given up on SVG?
If nobody from Adobe has anything to say about this horrible problem, I will take it as more evidence supporting the sad but persistent rumors that Adobe is back pedaling and giving up on SVG.
-Don
Re:Why Adobe's SVG doesn't work in Mozilla any mor (Score:3, Interesting)
Adobe's delayed release of Acrobat for Linux compared with Windows and Mac, their discontinuing the Framemaker on Linux beta program suggest to me that they don't mind losing various markets in their effort to consolidate their product lines.
Why Adobe doesn't support SVG more? It's simply an XML-ification of the capabilities they already own in PDF. Innovators dilemma. It competes too much with an existing product for them to promote it with any enthusiasm.
Scalability? (Score:1, Interesting)
So why is the fundamental unit of measure in WVG a "device-independent pixel" set to be equivalent to 96dpi? Windows already has the ability to have its screen dpi setting changed (though since it doesn't take this into account when drawing dialogs, only text, you often lose information). Why can't they then set it up so that it tries to draw based on that setting (with customizability, so that if I don't want a 3" start button I can shrink it), instead of just assuming 96dpi?
And is this a good time to ask for identificiation of the physical resoultion in the monitor's return signal (a la plug-n-play)? It would be convenient for the average user to not have to try to measure their screen and then calculate the pixels-per-inch -- why not have the monitor report its diagonal size, and let the OS compute, based on screen resolution, what the dpi should be? I know that that wouldn't be sufficiently calibrated for serious graphics applications, but then those folks (including myself) are already used to drawing a ruler on the screen and fiddling with the monitor controls until it lines up with one held up against the monitor.
But the basic question remains: Why is the fundamental unit of measurement 1/96 of an ideal inch, when few configurations actually operate at this level (eg. a 20.8"-viewable at 1600x1200, 13.3" at 1024x768). So why not make it tuned to the acutal resolution?
Re:SVG could surpass Flash... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait a minute. What you just said back there suggests that Konqueror is about to support SVG? (Surf, surf, surf) OK, so the real story is that SVG support will come about by it being included in kdegraphics, not (alas) khtml. Also, the level of support promised in KDE 3.2 is well short of the complete spec. What doesn't work yet includes:
Clearly, a lot of simple (and useful) stuff will work, but a lack of CSS support is pretty unfortunate. As has been pointed out, SVG uses an XML encoding (is this pedantically correct?) and that can get pretty verbose, but CSS can help the situation a lot, as well as making dynamic pages easier to create.
For a moment there, I thought maybe you were suggesting that a complete SVG implementation would be added to khtml, which could have meant that Safari would support SVG, and that would be seriously big news. As it is, I still wonder whether Apple is or will be working on SVG for incorporation into future products. If they are, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this will be released as Open Source.
Still, KDE supporting SVG is probably the best news that SVG has had for quite some time.