SVG And The Free Desktop(s)

A user writes "Christian Schaller has written an interesting article on SVG's current and possible uses on the GNU/Linux desktop. Though the article concentrates mostly on GNOME, it does mention the excellent work the KDE developers have been doing with KSVG, and refers to the upcoming SVG support in Mozilla too."

SVG & Steganogrpahy?

[bc90021]

From the article:

"Because it is an XML based file format, SVG allows the creator to conveniently embed arbitrary information inside of the file."

Granted, I'm guessing that the author is referring to graphics related information inside the file, but surely since it's just XML it could be used to embed just about any text or text-encoding?

stupid acronyms

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it have killed you to say Scalable Vector Graphics once in the article?

Re:no one wants it

[AKAImBatman]

I think that's a bit unfair. I for one would be happy if SVG was better supported as a web technology. The advantages to it becoming a standard is that useful, zoomable, interactive charting could be done easily on the client side. Just a little XML on the server side and then let the client deal with it. Right now I use Batik to render the SVG XML to PNG images before sending them to the client. Of course, the client can't zoom in on interesting areas like they can with pure SVG.

Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy?

[MisterFancypants]

Steganography? Are you going for a keyword karma whoring? Because your post is just silly. Who would try to embed some secret information in an XML file when the whole purpose of XML is so the files can easily be edited in an arbitrary text editor? It doesn't make any practical sense... Even if you encode the text somehow, its presence would still stick out like a much larger sore thumb than, say, a message hidden in a JPG file.

Woo, Open Standards

[tblease]

With the way things are moving towards more of these open standards, it's too bad that people are still relying so heavily on propriatary (sp?) formats like those found in MS Office and some of the Adobe products.

I work at the Center for Teaching, Learning Technology at the university I am enrolled at. I am currently putting together a web-based document management system that is built around XML, and after seeing how much more powerful these open standards can be (especially, when you start looking at all the wonderful concepts that augment XML -- XSL, XPATH, XSL:FO, and the like).

We used to put together all of our documentation for workshops and whatnot using MS Word, and then later switched to InDesign for the sake of having more control over the layout. The new web-based system means we lost some control over the layout of these documents, but the amount of time we've saved and the flexibility we've gained from using it is worth more than its weight in gold (all 2mb worth -- if that, even)

What's frightening, however, is to see these products like MS Word and others potentially offering the option to export to a more open format, like XML. Ever tried reading through MS Word generated HTML? It's almost a fun task, and I hate to think of the possibilty of having to read through MS Word generated XML... eep!

Re:Here's a real bleeding-edge idea..

[temojen]

2) Use a decent scaling algorithm that preserves quality.

The best way to do this is with vector based graphics, which is what SVG is.

Re:SVG & Steganogrpahy?

[JohnFluxx]

Well duh, the whole point steganography is that you can't prove the data is even there.

Re:Woo, Open Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever read through StarOffice XML? It's no treat either -- complex software creates big bloated XML.

Word HTML is full of crap so that you can "round trip" the documents DOC->HTML->DOC. They now have a plugin which generates plain HTML, but it's not super clean either.

Apparently the latest MS Office allows you to define your own XML schemas for use as part of an applicaiton workflow. However, I have no idea how useful this is, or if's just an extention of the forms/database bloat that's already in MS Office.

Re:Yay SVG!

[pNutz]

Indeed. Longhorn's vector graphics break the SVG standard, "because SVG did not integrate well with Avalon"--even though SVG is XML, like Avalon. You'd think with 400 developers working on Avalon, they would find a way to integrate it...

I'm sure they'll go out of their way to make it difficult to convert between their screwy system and the W3 standard. Hopefully someone will hack out a converter. And this IS important, for companies that don't want to rewrite all their vector graphics to port something to Linux. Reusing icons on different platforms used to be the easiest part.

Here we go again!

[fiannaFailMan]

Yeah yeah yeah "Flash sucks, blah blah blah."

Dude, the web is full of badly designed websites written in HTML. Is HTML a bad standard?

Flash is capable of creating compact little applications, parsing XML from a data source, playing video, and doing a million other things that are made possible by the ubiquitous Flash player. We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.' I wish the /. community would update their knowledge accordingly.

Sheesh!

Re:if (SVG = Flash) ....

[juhaz]

SVG can never become as annoying as Flash infestation, even if used for same purposes.

Considering that any SVG support will probably be in browsers themselves, not plugins, SVG-menus and animations and the like could gracefully degrade, and would work seamlessly with rest of the UI instead of stealing the show.

Vector graphics came home in 1983

[acomj]

With the vectrex video game system [atarimagazines.com]
I wonder... could those games be made to run under SVG... with frame buffering....

About Time!

[StormyMonday]

It's time for pixels to go away. With displays running from cellphones to graphic arts workstations, the concept just isn't useful any more above the renering level. I look forward to replacing as many as possible of the old pixel-based graphics format with something I can see at more than one display resolution.

Now if we can just get the Xwindows folks on board! When I say "12-point type", I mean a height of 6 lines per inch, not 12 pixels (enormous on the cellphone; invisible on the workstation).

No one wants it?

[bonch]

Hell, Y-Windows [y-windows.org] is thinking of using SVG for describing all their widgets. They plan a 1.0 release within the year.

SVG is being used almost everywhere I look. Icons are just the beginning.

Re:wave of the future

[Minna Kirai]

It's true that SVG (and XML in general) compresses well using normal Lempel-Ziv techniques.

But that only solves part of the problem, and isn't enough to make XML efficient for an integral part of interactive computer systems (where speed is crucial).

Normal XML is already slower than a binary format, because you must parse through the whole thing to reach the middle (linear time) versus jumping to an offset in the file (constant time). Adding compression to the mix makes that even worse, as now you've got to do the whole unpacking before the data can be read.

So although ZIP mostly solves the XML storage-size problem, it worsens the already bad XML access-time issue.

It's truely unfortunate that the XML standard didn't include some recommended/authoritative way to transform an XML file into a platform-dependent binary. Or even a defined mapping from XML into an XDR-like layout would be useful.

Re:if (SVG = Flash) ....

[k98sven]

SVG replaces PDF (Acrobat format)

No, it doesn't.

PDF (Portable Document Format) replaced PostScript as a page description language. Basically describing a printed page. PDF (and PS) both support vector graphics.

Whereas SVG is only a vector graphics format, it does not handle page layout and the other things required for printed page description.

If anything SVG replaces EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), which is the postscript language applied to an independent graphics object, as opposed to an actual printed page.

Re:No one wants it?

[ergo98]

SVG is seeing gradually increased mind- and market- share, however there is a foreboding cloud in the near future: Longhorn (the next generation Windows operating system) is going to implement an XML-based vector graphic technology [microsoft.com] similar to SVG (with the same fundamental advantages), but more aligned with .NET APIs and GDI (and thus incompatible with SVG). It seems logical that Internet Explorer 7 will support this format for embedded graphics, and the rest will be history -- Overnight invariably thousands of sites will support the new Microsoft. I say this from the humorously confused perspective of having written an article [microsoft.com] on SVG that was published by Microsoft's magazine.

As an aside, one of the biggest boosts to SVG, giving it some traction, would have been native support by Mozilla a year or two ago. Instead it was relegated to one-person side projects, and even for third party plug-ins new releases of Mozilla broke them.

inkscape and sodipodi - ( linux / windows / mac )

[Simarilius]

both these apps work on more than just linux. in fact from the SF stats the majority of users are win32 folks.