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Mozilla The Internet Graphics Software

Mozilla Gets (Beta) Native SVG support 321

Posted by timothy from the so-check-it-out-and-complain-constructively dept.
Rushuru writes "Mozilla is getting a beta native SVG support. Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows. SVG is similar in scope to Flash, but it is a W3 recommendation (i.e. a standard) and uses an open format. The project page has more info."
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Mozilla Gets (Beta) Native SVG support More

Mozilla Gets (Beta) Native SVG support

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  • Does anybody actually do anything in SVG? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Website examples?

  • There is a Geek God (Score:3, Funny)

    by ovoskeuiks ( 665553 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:16AM (#6483368)
    It was only a few hours ago I was reading a post in another slashdot article that was asking for SVG support in browsers looks like his prayers were answered

  • At last! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by darnok ( 650458 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:21AM (#6483382)
    *Finally*, I can start saying SVG is going to be supported natively in a browser, and pushing through projects on that basis.

    Until now, I've had to say you can use IE, then get an addon from Adobe. "What? Why doesn't MS support this SVG thing natively? What if Adobe decides to drop support for SVG; then what happens? ..."

    This is the best news I've read on Slashdot for a while
    • The Adobe plugin also has some trouble scrolling. E.g. when you view an A4-sized graphic, and it doesn't fit on screen, no scrollbar appears. (This is for viewing SVG's directly; can't remember what went wrong when you saw them embedded in HTML; I just remember that this also didn't go OK, as I once tried to show a logo I had created in Sodipodi.)
    • If you'll read the page you'll see "SVG is not switched on by default in official Mozilla builds". It's been this way for months. I believe there are some legal problems, IIRC they're using a GPL'ed library to do the rendering or something.

    • Re:At last! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by snillfisk ( 111062 ) <.mats. .at. .lindh.no.> on Sunday July 20, 2003 @09:00AM (#6483792) Homepage

      Until now, I've had to say you can use IE, then get an addon from Adobe. "What? Why doesn't MS support this SVG thing natively? What if Adobe decides to drop support for SVG; then what happens? ..."

      Sorrowly, this has already happened; Adobe hasn't updated their plugin since 2001 and is lacking support for everything newer than the 1.0 standard. The most promising plugin at the moment is with no doubt the Corel SVG Viewer [corel.com] which looks and handles really neat. We've tried the mozilla native support in earlier editions (mainly about ~3 months ago) and the implementation was currently very lacking of needed features.

      One point I would like to make; the first plugin (or browser) to support the upcoming SVG 1.2 standard is going to get a quite instant userbase, the interest for SVG is only growing -- something which SVG Open [svgopen.com] just showed (I was a coauthor for one of the papers, Distributed GML Management with SVG Tools [svgopen.org]).

      • Re:At last! (Score:3, Informative)

        by smallpaul ( 65919 )

        Sorrowly, this has already happened; Adobe hasn't updated their plugin since 2001 and is lacking support for everything newer than the 1.0 standard.

        This is not true. Adobe has an alpha [adobe.com] with support for SVG 1.2.

    • Re:At last! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 )
      "What? Why doesn't MS support this SVG thing natively?"

      Microsoft and Macromedia are business partners [internetnews.com].
      SVG is a potential threat to Flash*.
      Do the math.

      * Macromedia is ideally positioned to become the premiere vendor of SVG tools, but may see security in a home-grown file format**, not unlike some of their business partners.
      ** At least Flash is largely open, unlike some of their business partners' formats.

  • mozilla-bonobo (Score:4, Informative)

    by Pflipp ( 130638 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:25AM (#6483391)
    You could already have seen some of SVG through the mozilla-bonobo plugin [nongnu.org]. As this plugin actually activates Eye Of Gnome for the image viewing, and EOG is actually more of a pixel-graphics viewer that happens to read SVG through the (still lagging) librsvg, the capacities are limited though.

    For instance, you can only view SVG images as object tags, and complex stuff (like copied/ rotated graphics) aren't rendered well. (And it just so happens that Sodipodi produces SVG with a lot of copied/ rotated objects.)

  • Plotting against Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)

    by NoTildeQuestionMark ( 624812 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:28AM (#6483396) Homepage
    If this SVG patch became fully useable for displaying animation, and then you could convince a really popular animation site (say, HSR [homestarrunner.com]) to switch to SVG and recommend a switch to Mozilla for native support... well, then, open source could rule the world.

    ~
  • and yet people still use IE. As a web designer, I have to ask, "WHY!?"

    • Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkDust ( 239124 ) <marc@darkdust.net> on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:40AM (#6483422) Homepage

      and yet people still use IE. As a web designer, I have to ask, "WHY!?"

      Simple: because people are fucking lazy ! They get their IE with their Windows, and they are just too lazy to download and install Mozilla or Opera (and they don't care about them since every web designer/developer out there supports IE with their web pages).

      If someone visits my homepage with IE the background is replaced with simply white since IE can't handle transparent PNGs and a red warning box is diplayed explaining that IE is just not able to correctly display my homepage (while Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror do).

      If more web-pages would do this people would finally think, but this will take some months. MicroSoft gladly doesn't want to update IE any more, so people have to wait for the next Windows to get an update to IE, which is due in 2005 I think. Lots of time which could make a difference if the other browser developers and web designers/developers use that time. And features like good SVG support could really be that difference (and tabs, and blocking of JavaScript pop-ups, and ...).

      IE is out of date just now, but people don't care about this, that's the propblem...

      • MicroSoft gladly doesn't want to update IE any more, so people have to wait for the next Windows to get an update to IE, which is due in 2005 I think

        No, MS isnt producing standalone versions of IE anymore, they are still updating it. They never said anything about not updating it, updates are still provided, you jsut cant go grab "IE7.0" as it wont exist in a single form.

      • Here is my stoned idea.
        say Opera includes SVG support and can slim back down a little in download size (I remember when it would fit on a floppy of course). I just downloaded the adobe SVG plugin which was somewhere over 2 megs.

        Web designers like SVG and make sites with it. Now most people wont be able to see it without a plugin.

        So the website says "you need to download software to view this content", the user click ok and it installs Opera with settings defaulted to being as similar as IE as possible.

        Th
      • While I do agree that being lazy does factor in for many cases, I think fear of change is a pretty heavy influence as well. The perfect example is a forum I used to post on. Someone there was having problems with a couple pages in IE, and many of us suggested she try using Mozilla. She did, and reported being astonished by how much quicker it loaded a few pages that she read on a regular basis, liked the pop-up blocking and tabs, and was impressed by how many more useful features it had compared to IE. You'

    • Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JimDabell ( 42870 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:46AM (#6483432) Homepage

      Because:

      • "What's Mozilla?"
      • "What's SVG?"
      • "But there aren't any pages using SVG that I want to see."
      • "Flash is good enough for me."
      • "I don't know how to / want to figure out how to install Mozilla."
      • "All my favourites/passwords/auto form-fillins are in Internet Explorer."
      • "Mozilla looks weird compared with all the other programs on my computer."
      • "My employers have already standardized on Internet Explorer."
      • "I have to use Internet Explorer to run some .hta programs that I rely on." (or substitute any proprietary technology supported by Internet Explorer).
      • "My bank's website doesn't say that I can use Mozilla with it, but they do say I can use Internet Explorer with it."
      • "Internet Explorer is already installed on my computer."

      I'm a web developer too, and I hate having to deal with Internet Explorer too, but end-user inertia isn't something to dismiss as "people being stupid". You have to give them a reason to care enough to put effort into switching browsers.

      • Re:Yet another mozilla advantage over IE (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MikeFM ( 12491 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:54AM (#6483452) Homepage Journal
        The real problem is that coders that develop for IE rarely check how pages work in anything else while decent developers check not only Mozilla but also IE and often Opera, Lynx, Konquerer, and whatever else they can get their hands on. Therefore IE users always have the best browsing experience.

        I suggest anybody developing not-for-profit sites to simply save themselves the trouble and not make any special effort to support IE. Code to the standards. If IE can still show your page then great. If not then let the users know IE sucks - put a 'Works best with Mozilla.' button on your page to link to where users can download Mozilla. Circa 1997 gimmicks still work. ;)
        • Even if they don't check (it's really not necessary), they should stick to writing (x)HTML that validates... that way you've got a good excuse and a clear consience when somebody comes running and complains about your site not working...

          If it validates to a recent standard, it's pretty much the browsers fault and not the designer...

        • The real problem is that coders that develop for IE rarely check how pages work in anything else

          Which I've always found to be a bizarre way of doing things. I've found that ever since Mozilla .9 or thereabouts, that by coding to Mozilla, you will get a page that will work in pretty much every major browser. Granted, I'm not doing anything that fancy, just dynamic pages built from php/mysql that use javascript to manipulate the dynamic elements based on user choices. Since the DOM (at least the element
      • ... why downloading a plugin for Flash is easier than downloading a plugin for SVG (for IE; or not download anything for Mozilla at all)

        • Flash comes prepackaged with Internet Explorer. It's also used on many websites, so the chances of a user already having it installed is very high. But the argument was that users are resistant to switching browsers, not that installing a plugin for your existing browser is hard (it is, but not anywhere near as hard).

    • and yet people still use IE. As a web designer, I have to ask, "WHY!?"
      When you buy a car, the car is often delivered with a simple stereo system and a couple of speakers. Yet very few people decides to replace the stereo system with a CD changer and a six way speaker system. Why is that?

      I don't think it has anything to do with ignorance or laziness. Apart from cost, guess it is because the built in system does the job adequately.

  • include it in the standard build - when it's done (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wfmcwalter ( 124904 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:29AM (#6483401) Homepage
    SVG is a brilliant standard, and will go a long way to replace the web's millions of opaque flash and shockwave animations (and any number of "diagram" gifs) with something standard and accessible. I'm exceptionally frustrated that I can't realistically author mission-critical sites with SVG as a major (or even the entire) component.

    I do, however, pray thay SVG isn't included into standard mozilla (or any other browser) until it's reached maturity (which its page indicates it's pretty far from). I spend too much of my time working around the half-assed CSS implementations of older netscape and IE browsers, and I don't want another decade of worrying about which part of the SVG standard was implemented buggily (sp?) by which version of which browser.

    I'm all for beta releases, developer's builds, etc., as the team needs as much feedback from as full an SVG authoring community as it can. But as soon as someone starts authoring sites that depend on the weird vagaries of one browser or another's SVG misimplementation, we'll be going down a painfull bug-for-bug compatibility road. Caveat.

    • I do, however, pray thay SVG isn't included into standard mozilla (or any other browser) until it's reached maturity (which its page indicates it's pretty far from). I spend too much of my time working around the half-assed CSS implementations of older netscape and IE browsers, and I don't want another decade of worrying about which part of the SVG standard was implemented buggily (sp?) by which version of which browser.

      Amen. I don't hold out much hope for this though, doesn't Mozilla already include

    • SVG support in Mozilla has been around for years, literally. The reason it never got into Moz yet is for exactly that reason.

      Last I heard, maybe they were going to support the static SVG mini-spec or something. I'd be surprised if they dropped the policy of not including half baked implementations now.

      • The reason it never got into Moz yet is for exactly that reason.

        My understanding that there was also a licence incompatibility issue wrt libart. I'd guess that's not an issue for the GDI+ win32 build, but has the libart licence issue been resolved?

        Last I heard, maybe they were going to support the static SVG mini-spec or something.

        The maturity level of both mozilla svg and some of the others (I'm most familiar with batik) shows that everyone seems to have most of the static features down; it's the dy

  • SVG test images and SVG apps (Score:5, Informative)

    by greenrd ( 47933 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:47AM (#6483435) Homepage
    After you've downloaded you can test your new SVG-enabled mozilla build by checking out these galleries [sourceforge.net] (see links on left of page). The thumbnails are ordinary bitmap images but they are linked to SVGs.

    Bonus: All the images in the above galleries are Open Source, unless otherwise stated! (Quite literally, because SVG files are like "source code" for a vector image.)

    As for SVG creating and editing software, apart from the new dSVG software announced earlier today on Slashdot, we have:

    • Apache Batik [apache.org] for all you Java people. This is a fairly mature library (I believe it's based off the CSIRO library), plus sample apps like a viewer, a rasteriser (i.e. convert to gif, jpeg, etc.), a font converter, and a pretty-printer. Quotage: "With Batik, you can manipulate SVG documents anywhere Java is available. You can also use the various Batik modules to generate, manipulate, transcode and search SVG images in your applications or applets." Batik, according to its test suite, supports all of the static SVG specification (i.e. static images) and some of the dynamic specification (i.e. animations and scripting).

      (Get your easy installable RPMs for Batik, and many other Java projects, at jpackage [jpackage.org] - but good luck finding a download link that works! Batik 1.5 hadn't propagated to all the Sourceforge mirrors when I tried it last night - so try all the US mirrors, it will be on at least one of them. Also, because of the numerous dependencies, it's recommended to use a smart package manager that can automatically resolve dependencies, like apt-get or urpmi.)

    • Sodipodi [sourceforge.net], [screenshots [sourceforge.net]] a GNOME SVG drawing app, currently at version 0.32. It hosts the open source SVG image gallery linked to above.

    • For more, including KDE/Konq support for SVG, see this Wiki page [protocol7.com]

  • SVG for data visualization (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Henry Stern ( 30869 ) <henry@stern.ca> on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:48AM (#6483436) Homepage
    This might be a bit off topic, but I want to use SVG for data visualization and have been having trouble finding suitable software.

    The SVG implementations I've found so far either have no external user interface with nice things like scrollbars (Adobe/Corel) or can't handle my very large graphics (everything else I've seen).

    I've been very disappointed about this lack of good viewers. SVG is well-suited for data visualization and could become a "killer app" with the right software support.
    • SVG has a long way to go before it will be suitable for data visualization. Most real world visualizations are based on large datasets and require a certain degree of interactivity. Both of these are possible using SVG. However, coding up an interactive application using JavaScript and the DOM model favored by the SVG designers is a non-trivial task.

      A typical data set may contain 10,000 or more elements (e.g. financial analysis, temperature/forcast data, usage stats for a medium size web site, marketing

  • Adobe SVG plug-in not windows-only (Score:5, Informative)

    by Oniros ( 53181 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:50AM (#6483441)
    Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows.

    The Adobe plug-in works fine on MacOS 9 and MacOS X.

    There are even betas for Red Hat Linux and Solaris 8, though I have no idea how they fare.

    Check:
    http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/ main.html
    • In fact, the preamble is wrong. The Adobe plugin does not work correctly on Mozilla Windows or Linux. The reason, iirc, is that they used a non-frozen XPCOM based plugin API, which mozilla.org subsequently dropped, rendering their work useless. As you might imagine they were pissed, and didn't do another one.

      I think the Mac Mozilla never had this plugin API, so the version of the plugin for that browser simply used the old netscape plugin API, which is severely limited.

      It's a shame. A web app I wrote at

    • It worked fine under Linux with Phoenix 0.5, but Firebird 0.6 broke it.

  • Question. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rhinobird ( 151521 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:53AM (#6483446) Homepage
    Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.

    Are these possible and am i missing something from the svg documents? Or is it not there and there going to be a another super set of standards that uses SVG for the graphics and links with audio and has some scripting functions for interactivty?

  • SVG never worked in windows (Score:3, Informative)

    by savaget ( 26702 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:53AM (#6483447)
    Previously one had to use 3rd party plugins such as that from Adobe, and they only worked on windows.


    This is untrue as the plugin crashed in Windows. The release notes have noted this all along. Only a seperate build(branch) of Moz had native SVG support.

  • What happened to the plain Linux build of mozilla with SVG support?

    I see a RPM for Redhat 7.1 (gee, up to date), but no straight tar.gz. The link on mozilla.org is broken.

    What happened to it?

  • Flash format is open (Score:4, Interesting)

    by weinford ( 97037 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @06:58AM (#6483456) Homepage Journal
    The SWF Format for flash movies is open, anyone can write programs with SWF output. Unfortunetaly I don't have a link at hand for documentation, but there are several programs with SWF output. I think that SWF has a major advantage over SVG, which is file size. The SVG XML format wastes plenty of bandwidth. Don't misunderstand me, XML and SVG are still very nice things, and I'm more than happy to see the news here, just wanted to point these things out.

    • Re:Flash format is open (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JimDabell ( 42870 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @07:11AM (#6483478) Homepage

      I think that SWF has a major advantage over SVG, which is file size

      A common technique in web development is to serve things in a compressed format. Virtually all browsers support this by transparently decompressing the files after they are recieved. This is part of HTTP (content-encoding).

      Binary, already-compressed file formats don't benefit from this, but XML-based formats benefit a great deal. In practice, there won't be much difference in size between SVG and Flash, for the vast majority of people.

      • A common technique in web development is to serve things in a compressed format. Virtually all browsers support this by transparently decompressing the files after they are recieved. This is part of HTTP (content-encoding).

        In addition, most plugins (at least which I have tried) also support SVGZ directly (standard gzip'ed SVG), both from the local disk and from the internet. Normally this compresses somewhere in the ratio of 80-90% (there is however still a few problems with large SVG-files in the plugin

    • If it's so open, than why don't we see many opensource editors, viewers and translators for it? Well, there is gplflash [swift-tools.com], but it's very outdate and doesn't display 99% of flash content that is published around.

      Something is very fishy about flashy.

  • Native vs. non-native SVG (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KasparS ( 321387 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @07:02AM (#6483466) Homepage
    (1) While I agree with some
    posters that there is a danger of distributing unfinishend
    implementations, having a NATIVE SVG is a real breakthrough though.
    Quote: "Mozilla can handle documents that contain SVG, MathML, XHTML,
    SMIL, etc. all mixed together in the same 'compound' document.... ".
    Means for instance that you can simply add a little vector graphic INTO
    your XHTML code instead of importing png. Also means that the same
    DOM/Ecma interface can be used to program dynamic websites, or that you
    can dynamically transform XML contents into XHTML/SVG with XSLT
    client-side on the fly...

    (2) On another note: Adobe's Plug-in version 6.0 BETA is available. And
    it does not crash Mozilla 1.4 (Win2k) when embedded in HTML. In order
    to install it with Mozilla (tested with Moz 1.4/Win2k) you must copy
    the 2 files from:
    C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins\*
    to c:\Program Files\Mozilla.org\Mozilla\Plugins\ Did not see any Unix
    version :(

    http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html [adobe.com]

    PS: Plugin v3.0 kills Moz 1.4 (and others if you don't use iframes)

    (3) There are some really cool SVG sites. My favorites:

    http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/ [carto.net]
    (cool examples)

    http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/ [protocol7.com]
    (documentation about obscuret extensions,
    i.e. shows how to get/post to URLS from within SVG ...)
    - K

  • Open Standards: SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gaspyy ( 514539 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @07:32AM (#6483525)
    I just want to point out that Flash is an open format - you can download the specs from Macromedia.

    I think SVG is very promising, but Flash already is available for 95% of the computers. It's reasonably fast, extremely compact (both the plugin and the .swf files) and its scripting language is quite powerful.

    What I don't understand is why so many /.-ers hate it so much. Just because it's not GNU/Flash?
    • There are no free software authoring environments. Flash is open as long as you have the Flash program, or maybe SWiSH, all of which are proprietary and mostly expensive.
      • Flash does weigh in a little heavy in the cost arena but it is has been dropping in the past few years.

        Swish is 50 dollars which I dare say "CHEAP" and while Swish does not do all that flash does, you can do a hell of a lot with it. I own swish and use it when I need to be quick and dirty, but then again I use it a lot more that my owned copy of flash these days, as most of my animations are lite weight.

        As for free software flash operating enviroments. Well they did open up the specification to the worl

    • People hate Flash for many reasons. The one that stands out for me is that it just doesn't work right. I'm used to tabbing through links on a page. I'm used to middle-clicking to open in a new window. I'm used to right-clicking and getting a useful set of options. I'm used to my browser remaining quiet, instead of blaring out music over the top of whatever I am already listening to.

      There are a hundred different ways in which it doesn't work right. Flash just doesn't fit well with the web. It's a

    • Here Here!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Arbogast_II ( 583768 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @08:18AM (#6483633) Homepage
      Seems like if the Open Source community would be better off improving Ming .swf file generator. Flash is good, and I don't see the need for adding to the Tower of Babel when a good standard with hooks to Open Source exists.

      Why not back Flash and put the effort in improving Open Source support of Flash???
    • What I don't understand is why so many /.-ers hate it so much

      There are numerous problems [slashdot.org] with Flash, and SVG has the potential to solve all of them. Many people hate Flash so much because of the countless sites that have been rendered unreadable and unusable by gratuitous use of Flash.

    • There isn't native Flash support in any web browser; it's always through a plugin, and plugins never integrate nicely with the browser's normal behavior. Just to be extra annoying, there's no well-publicized external Flash viewer to use outside of the browser, either.

      It also gets undeserved flak due to web designers who think that an animation makes a good web site, and it's relatively hard to do alternative renderings of Flash (with SVG, you have some hope of getting the navigation information out and let
    • First, being able to download the specs does not make the format "open". An open format is defined in an open, relatively transparent process with input from multiple players including vendors and end-users. As long as Macromedia maintains sole control over the direction of the specification, it is not open. You can also download specs for the Word .DOC format. Second, you cannot download the specs without agreeing to a license agreement. The license agreement is specifically designed to allow you to creat

  • learnsvg.com (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pflipp ( 130638 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @07:42AM (#6483548)
    While on the topic of "SVG/SMIL != Flash" (or is, whatever), see also here [learnsvg.com]. Though it is a book promotion website, there are lots of comprehensive examples on SVG, scripting SVG through Javascript (similar to simple Flash buttons) and combining SVG with SMIL.

    That is, the W3C website says the link is also about SMIL. I'm still looking for that link.

  • Nice! job (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 286 ( 620933 )
    It seem like just yesterday, in all the dSVG posts, people were complaing about just how weak
    SVG support was and its back-burner status in Mozilla .

    Native support is great, everything else is just a hack.
    I for one am so excited to see this news!
  • Who decided it would be a good idea to have Mozilla be totally exposed to the whims of a plugin?

    A plugin should be sent mouse and keyboard events and be given an API to use to draw things into a "window" defined by the browser, and perhaps an API to retrieve data via an URL, and that's it. Mozilla might get that part right. But the plugin should also run in its own address space, so that if it decides to crash or otherwise do something stupid it won't take the browser with it. Mozilla definitely does

  • Mozilla has had SVG for ages (Score:5, Informative)

    by Daa ( 9883 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @08:27AM (#6483666) Homepage
    As one of the mozilla SVG developers I find it a bit funny that a user creating a freshmeat site to stash their copy of a mozilla svg build is slashdot news. there are daily win32 builds ( from both the trunk and branch SVG trees) posted to ftp.mozilla.org and about monthly linux ( RH7.1) tar.gz. and have been since mozilla 1.0

    There is still no agreement to make SVG part of the base GRE install, the current effort is to re-merge the SVG devel branch back to the trunk

    dave

  • License Issues (Score:2, Informative)

    by caillon ( 629714 )
    There has been a native SVG implementation in the Mozilla tree available for ages. In the 0.9.7 or 0.9.8 time frames, IIRC. However, it will not be turned on by default in any build because it requires libart which is licensed as LGPL only.

    Mozilla.org has already refuted allowing it be distributed by default in the bug which allowed libart to be checked in to the tree under the other-licenses/ directory of the cvs repository. The reasoning was that Mozilla sources are released under the MPL and the ex

  • SVG is much more than a competitor to Flash (Score:4, Informative)

    by Paul Bain ( 9907 ) <paulbain.pobox@com> on Sunday July 20, 2003 @09:40AM (#6484013)
    SVG is similar in scope to Flash, but it is a W3 recommendation (i.e. a standard) and uses an open format.

    SVG is actually much broader in scope than Flash, PDF, or other proprietary formats, as aptly pointed out [xml.com] by Paul Presod [prescod.net] at SVG Open 2003 [svgopen.org].

    Furthermore, the XML project of the Apache Software Founcation is hard at work on Batik [apache.org], a Java-based toolkit for applications or applets that want to use images in the SVG format.

  • I do a lot of Actionscript-heavy Flash stuff, and I really don't see SVG as an alternative for much of that. Flash has lots of features that are good for things OTHER than animation, and the players are pretty consistent across platforms (since they all come from Macromedia).

    On the other hand, I could definitely see SVG being a big winner for animated banner ads and the like, as well as for more useful stuff like data visualization.

    I think Flash has more or less become what Macromedia originally hoped Di
  • Besides there being a Freshmeat posting of a beta, has any particular milestone been reached in Mozilla/SVG development? I was able to compile and use SVG on Linux for a while already, and SVG-enabled builds have been available periodically. The netscape.public.mozilla.svg newsgroup does not have particularly much to say about status -- in fact, Alex Fritze, the primary programmer behind the effort, posted the following on July 16: "IMO Mozilla SVG is still too immature for inclusion in default builds. W

  • Animations, line drawings and Mapquest (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Sunday July 20, 2003 @11:41AM (#6484820) Homepage Journal
    It appears that many people want SVG as a kind of Flash replacement. I've been waiting for general SVG acceptance for some time, but not for animations. I want it for maps, charts, and logos.

    For example, Mapquest puts out lovely maps in GIF format, but they'd be a lot more useful to me if they were in SVG so that my 600 DPI printer could clearly render all the street names, rather than being locked into a format at 72 DPI. (They could use PDF for that, and I'm not entirely sure why they don't. Too expensive, either computationally or financially?)

    Charts and logos would be a lot nicer given in SVG than GIF or JPEG. Again, that's most important when I intend to print it, but it's also useful for something where I'd like to zoom in to get the details.

    A pet peeve: I see many corporate documents intended for printing where the logos obviously came from a web site, because they're blocky and ugly. It looks amateurish, but it can be very difficult to get a high-res version of an image. You can't incorporate a PDF into your word-processing documents, and EPS support is very spotty.

    So I'm really looking forward to SVG. I just hope there's a button to turn off all the stupid animations. I use Firebird with an extension that requires a separate click to activate a Flash animation. That makes many web pages a far more pleasant experience. Yay SVG, boo Flash/Shockwave.

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