Firefox 1.1 Plans Native SVG Support 415
Spy Hunter writes "The Scalable Vector Graphics format has yet to take off on the web, perhaps due to a small installed base of SVG-enabled browsers. That could soon change as the latest Firefox 1.1 nightly builds have started coming with native SVG support compiled in and enabled by default. If this feature makes into the Firefox 1.1 release (which is not certain, but likely, as the developers want it to happen) it will increase the number of web users who have an SVG renderer installed. But perhaps more interesting than that is the possibility of mixing SVG graphic elements directly into the markup of regular XHTML pages, freeing vector graphics from the small rectangle of a browser plugin and opening up a host of exciting new possibilities for web developers. This is enabled by the integration of SVG directly into the Gecko rendering engine, instead of as a browser plugin. With such a useful web developer feature available only in Firefox, could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?"
Opera (Score:5, Interesting)
SVG soon widely supported? (Score:3, Interesting)
What is SVG? (Score:5, Interesting)
Javascript SVG Sparklines (Score:2, Interesting)
Javascript SVG Sparklines [overstimulate.com]
wasn't this in kde 3.2? (Score:5, Interesting)
STABLE VECTORS
2004-02-18 18:38:29 by Andreas Streichardt KDE 3.2 has been released and thus KSVG is stable now. If you want to have KSVG installed on your system please install the kdegraphics package. The KSVG team wishes happy vectoring. Please report any bugs via http://bugs.kde.org./ [bugs.kde.org]
I would kill for SVG in schema (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm also sick and tired of wallpapering my cubial with schema print out from the plotter. SVG DB schema would be an excellent tool to have- go from a 30,000 ft view to a grass blade view with out having to load up different pages, or deal with a wall paper print out.
Someone wanna make the tool?
What graphic editors support SVG? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to use Corel and WordPerfect Presentations, which has a propriety vector graphics format, WPG.
Re:failure to take off (Score:5, Interesting)
SVG is not just another vector-based image format, it is scriptable, patent-free, open source, and now built into Firefox. Yes, I know Flash is scriptable too...
with XMLHttp, SVG, and the latest nightlies of Firefox, I've been able to create dashboard programs very easily, with "guages", "warning lights", and all the stuff that my management wants to see in a simple easy to understand manner, all with open source software, and a little effort on my part.
It won't be that easy to get it implemented at my employer, but I was able to do it all in a couple hours without Flash.
I'm happy for Flash and SVG to coexist. I'm sure that they can live happily together.
Re:SVG soon widely supported? (Score:1, Interesting)
With such a useful web developer feature available only in Firefox, could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?"
*shakes head*
Oh well, OSS is obviously the "stuff that matters" here.
Re:failure to take off (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering it was only made a standard in 2001, things are only going slightly slower than CSS and HTML. The real problem is that SVG is hard to implement. I don't disagree that the availability of Flash has lowered the priority, but as far as open-source implementations are concerned, I thnk it was destined to take a while.
Re:SVG soon widely supported? (Score:5, Interesting)
IE will support SVG natively or via Adobe's horribly outdated SVG plugin?
Please provide a reference link.
Please: SVG Maps (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Maps is a significant advance over what I've seen at Mapquest/Yahoo Maps, but they can do a lot better.
They could have used PDF, but that requires a separate and not-very-interactive application, or Flash, but that's plain evil. SVG really is the way to go for this.
Opera (Score:2, Interesting)
"only in Firefox" - NOT (Score:3, Interesting)
This integrated-SVG is planned for FireFox 1.1 and already available in Opera 8.
Closed-source software rules, at least sometimes :-)
Re:"only in Firefox" (Score:1, Interesting)
Somehow I think you're right. What would make a huge difference in the adoption of SVG would be if adobe post-acquisition makes the flash team incorporate native SVG support in flash. Flash is ubiquitous, cross platform, and small. It would be the logical choice for anyone doing SVG in the browser. Ofcourse, whether flash would still be small with a native SVG implementation is something else entirely. But hey
Then again, it wouldn't have to be entirely native. I've written an SVG class for flash, and it is actually not bad performance wise, as long as you stick to what's natively supported (lines and quadratic curves). Importing and rendering half a meg of SVG can be done in a few seconds entirely in actionscript. If the flash drawing API had support for a few more of the primitives SVG has, you could write a quite useful actionscript-based SVG class for generic SVG import and rendering. Couple it with an actionscript DOM implementation, and tie it in with the existing CSS mechanisms in flash, and you would get quite a lot of mileage out of it without bloating the player by more than a few KB.
The Doors SVG Opens Up (Score:5, Interesting)
When you open up the SVG door, you don't just make space for "pretty pictures." You ALSO get,...
As SVG comes on line, at both the web-browser level and the desktop-programming level, and as people become proficient in these things, we'll make a major step forward in user interface.
Working with graphs will change the way we think. Our tools have, so far, afforded [emacswiki.org] creating hierarchical structures. That is, it's far easier to express hierarchy with text editors, than it is to express network. Hierarchy is fine, but it's only part of the picture. The other part is more-biological looking network organizations. As the tools come online to create biological organizations (as we see appearing in message-oriented programming models, component based developments,) we'll think about programming (and perhaps our world) in very different ways.
To make this a little clearer: If you look in magazine articles where they're discussing programming architecture and software layout, you're going to see lots of 2D diagrams with lots of pieces plugging into other pieces in a graphical layout- sort of like a circuit board. This is different than the way we have traditionally programmed, which is more like a tree shape. Even within object oriented programming, because our interface still affords tree layouts. Where we have explored beyond tree layouts, (complex networks of design patterns,) we have struggled with the user interface, and people have stretched out to make better representations that capture graph-like programs: Think of your clumbsy UML editors, and things like that- really trying to hack a solution between more-or-less linear code expressions, and the 2D graphs that we're thinking in.
When SVG is well understood, documented, with tools at desktop and web levels, we should start to see native 2D programming languages, that don't feel like either toy languages, or cheap hacks riding on top of other programming languages.
I've written more about this at Futures:SvgRevolution. [taoriver.net]
Re:And... the big news (Score:3, Interesting)
Accept Header (Score:5, Interesting)
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
Will the new version prefer SVG in that accept header, or will SVG fall after png, in the q=0.5 category?
I'm askng because in certain software projects I work with, I use content negotiation to deliver the image format the user wants [PLUG: http://fdcl.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]] and that lets them decide if they can handle PNG or they must use the crummy gif equivalent. Firefox specifically prefers png, so that wins. I'm sure this would be the only method that SVG's are delivered to Firefox, since nobody wants to put a file onto a website that will never be seen.
Re:cool something new again! (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong, at least as supported formats are concerned the more Firefox can display and render, the better.
Because that's a real "killer"-feature in the pure sense of the word. If you have a majority of Firefox users on your website (and many websites already have, for example heise.de or arstechnica.com, probably slashdot too) you can put some Firefox-only goodies online (like SVG or transparent PNGs, etc.)
And that will cause the remaining IE-users to switch.
OpenLaszlo makes full blown AJAX apps on Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad [useit.com] in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia [director-3d.com] to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability [nngroup.com]. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.
OpenLaszlo [openlaszlo.com] is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.
Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.
Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of its overwhelming installed base and consistency across multiple platforms.
The problem with SVG is that it's extremely spotty and inconsistent across the different browsers and plug-ins and cell phones that implement it. So the lowest common denominator is very very low indeed. Dynamic HTML has the same inconsistency problems but with much worse graphics, and it's that horrible inconsistency that forces cross-browser web applications to be so clumsy and hard to use -- because they must restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator. But Flash is consistent across all platforms, and it has high quality graphics.
I've written complex, rich interactive web based applications in both SVG and Laszlo, and I like them both. I've also used Microsoft's VML [piemenu.com], which enabled animated vector graphics inline with html many years ago, and Dynamic [piemenu.com] HTML [piemenu.com] Behavior [piemenu.com] Controls [piemenu.com], which work pretty well, but only in Explorer, so they're a dead end.
SVG is wonderful, but it's lost its steam: too little, too late. Adobe, once its main proponent, has totally forgotten about it, and they're quite unlikely to put any more effort into it, now that they've bought Macromedia. Batik development has been stalled, and it's slow because it's "100% Pure Java". SVG has some nice advantages over Flash, but it will never beat Flash's 98% penetration.
I'd love to see SVG get its shit together, but it's going to be a long time the way the companies that were once sponsoring it like Adobe, Canon and Kodak, have appearently given up and gone on to other things. I'd love for somebody to prove that I'm wrong, but Flash has kicked SVG's ass in the market.
Once there's a fast, stable, full featured, ubiquitious SVG renderer (like Firefox may someday support), it will make a lot of sense to target it with the Laszlo compiler. But SVG is a huge complex standard, and it will take a lot of work to completely implement it in Firefox.
But there's a much more interesting and efficient route than building everything including SVG and the kitchen sink into a web browser, and that's to factor out and develop a reusable open source Flash-compatible SWF player,
Inline SVG in Internet Explorer with Adobe SVG (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe's SVG viewer supports inline SVG in Internet Explorer (but not Firefox/Mozilla). It uses the "Binary Behaviors" ActiveX plug-in interfaces. It participates in the browser page rendering process like an ordinary html element, and you can use namespaces to embed SVG elements inline with html on the web page.
That's the same way Microsoft's VML elements work, which is just another Binary Behavior plug-in bundled with the browser. Basically you make a binary ActiveX object and give it an ID, then you declare a namespace to be associated with that id, which binds all elements in that namespace to be handled by the ActiveX object. It's a generic way to extend the web browser with ActiveX controls.
Mozilla also has a plug-in interface, but it doesn't provide the kind of inline rendering features that Internet Explorer's Binary Behaviors support.
When Adobe developed their SVG plug-in, they took advantage of some of the "advanced" Mozilla plug-in interfaces, to support their JavaScript integration (not inline rendering). But between Mozilla 0.99 and Mozilla 1.0, those plug-in interfaces changed, in a way that actually broke Adobe's SVG viewer in Mozilla [slashdot.org]. After Mozilla 1.0 shipped, any page that used even the simplest standard SVG would actually crash Mozilla.
Mozilla 1.0 crashing with Adobe's SVG plug-in was the first nail in SVG's coffin, and Adobe buying Macromedia was the last.
-Don
This has been in MOOX's builds from the beginning (Score:1, Interesting)
Moox's builds are here: http://moox.ws/ [moox.ws]
Re:failure to take off (Score:1, Interesting)
I blame MS for the failure of VML; I honestly wanted it to succeed. At this point though, I'll put my money on SVG over an orphaned half standard.
SVG considered immature (Score:3, Interesting)
no offense surely there are a lot of people who like SVG. If you are one of the ppl who say: XML (and thus SVG also) is ment only to be generated and processed by a programs, then fine.
However I think XML is usefull to be able as a human to read/debug documents, and for easy exploration you should also be able to write simple stuff. XHTML proves that people want to do the later, while XMI shows that you probably need to stick to the former.
The point of critics about SVG is: how braindead can a XML dialect designer (or in this a graphics description language designer) be to distinguish absolute and relative coordinates by upper or lower case capitalization of single letters, namely x and y?
This is a prime example where an attribute would be more usefull.
angel'o'sphere