SVG. The way forward or a blind alley?

I've been hearing of the virtues of svg for at least four years now and to date it really doesn't appear to have made the impact of the early hype.

I've no axe to grind either way, but I've yet to see a breakthrough in this file types usage. I've only come across one web site that used an svg file as an integral part of the site. All the other svg files I have encountered have been to demonstrate svg's capabilities, but not as an integral part of a standard web site.

It would appear to me that the main thrust for using svg at present is within vector file exchange, via import / export filters.

Is this as good as it gets?

It does appear that support for SVG is declining rather than progressing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics

The wikipedia article states that Adobe has announced it will discontinue their SVG browser plugin on January 1, 2008.

From the article it also appears that very few browsers support full SVG specifications.

I think I remember some posts about SVG being the up and coming 'new' thing. Is any technology that is 6 years old or older (1998?) ready to sweep the vector graphics industry?

Like Egg, I don't have any Axe to grind. But I would like to know if SVG will become more available or slowly evaporate.

can't get worked up about web-site design I'm afraid - not my scene at all - but it does seem to me to be chicken and egg:

not much browser support means not many web-sites use it
not many web-sites using it means little pressure on browsers to comply fully

Images on a web site in SVG vector would be fully manipulative too - this is going to be a dis-incentive to many - the web is already a free-for-all.

I could be put right on that one of course just my view :)

SVG is a very powerful file format, and whether that was the original intention or not is moot..

SVG is an open standard
SVG is easily editable directly
SVG is the best alternative to PDF for illustration vectors [as opposed to CAD etc] - so no surprise then if adobe is backing off from SVG, especially now they own flash.....

well, of course, many of the W3C standards have been slow to become real world standards. MS recalcitrance being a large part of the cause. FF and Opera have pushed MS into a certain complaince on some issues, but they still have one foot firmly stuck in their own yard. Strict compliance is slow to come. Even the W3C's own browser (Amaya) is only partial at present. Is there some slowdown due to the need to implement the technology even as it continues to be developed?

I think that the assertion that SVG is a superior image format for the web is inarguable. I mean, how long a go did we accept it's equivalent for text, bezier over raster fonts?

So? why do we not see more SVG image based webpages? For the same reason that png has not become accepted widely; MS/IE does not support it and the majority of net users use IE and if you want viewers to view your site, you trail along after Bill and his boys, like it or no and blah, blah etc.

people will continue to employ bitmap formats (.png, increasing now that MS has capitulated) in order to maintain 'ownership' of their images, but the majority of new image material on the web is non-proprietary (if we are willing to discount all the 'clipart purveyors', and I for one, am).

the notion that ideas can be owned (in the sense that technologies can be employed as an expression of ideas) is definitely on the wane. Some of the most sophisticated software ideas are opening up. The technology that Pixar used for many of it's most well received motion pictures is now available in open source.

As Steve mentioned, their will be further resistance now that Adobe owns Flash (did I just hear a penny drop?) and this will doubtless mean that SVG's full implementation will depend on a more scriptable environment. At present, JavaScript is still the main means of animating SVG on the web and JS can not 'contain' the animation in the way that Flash can, but that is simply one more hurdle. The speed with which increasing numbers of people can receive data from the web has obviated one of SVG's biggest advantages over bitmaps, but realtime, photorealistic motion imaging (theoretically possible in SVG and, at present, only in SVG) is on the horizon. Consider, for instance, that SVG's relationship to its container (the browser) and it's scriptability makes it possible to have the image/animation respond to its environment, a feature that Flash does not have and likely, never will. On a simple level, this will mean images and animations that are aware of the size and the shape of their container, can become aware of changes to them and change themselves in response. On a somewhat grander scale, animations that are 'aware' of other content in the page and are capable, via logic embedded IN the animation, to modify or even create new content.

I think SVG or some new technology born of SVG is indeed the future.

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So? why do we not see more SVG image based webpages? For the same reason that png has not become accepted widely; MS/IE does not support it and the majority of net users use IE and if you want viewers to view your site, you trail along after Bill and his boys, like it or no and blah, blah etc.

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GeoBen I think you may have found the remaining nail to SVG's coffin. At least as web page support is concerned. From what I have read the last day or so SVG is used more often on CellPhones and PDAs. But MS has been working on that front for some time with Windows CE, I think the latest version of CE is 5.0.

MS/IE will be supporting XAML as SilverLight. There is already a beta plugin available.

SVG is another form of XML.

yes, but Silverlight is really a competitor for contained XML imaging, yes? a competitor for Flash, putting themselves in the unusual position of competing with a stronger opponent. It extends their .net empire, but it's still external to the browser (requires a plugin) and it cannot interact with the browser or the rest of the browser content, though, as many developers do with Flash, Silverlight can be used as the entirety of the content itself.

one more self-defining pseudo-standard.

MS reminds me of them fellas ya usta know back in high school that would stick a finger into yer drink and then tell you that they will drink it if you won't.

geo.

Geo and Bill

I find this very interesting.

Geo thanks for the update on the web-site angle. As one who's current output is 99.9% proprietary, I've never worried about svg on the web much at all. What you outline sounds good though for animating sites, whether in svg, or some other flavour of xml.

The plugin angle's interesting too, I will pass on expressing opinon about MS, this is a polite forum.

SVG alive and well in the open-source.
Inkscape is catching up on pdf too.

SVG support is indeed disappointing. Wikipedia uses loads of svg files (both as images in articles and as small icons), but if you look closely, you'll see that Wikipedia uploads a png version of the svg for viewing :(
Only by opening the svg image by clicking it is there a real svg loaded in the browser window (firefox)

I for one was (!) enthusiastic to export my Xara drawings to svg for Wikipedia, but this will have not much use. It only offers users with other languages an svg file which they can readily translate into their own. But changing the labels isn't really that hard with a little photo-editing anyway...

If no one uses svg, then svg has no use. So as others stated, this is a vicious circle...
I don't find svg accessible and ready to use in webpages (IE...).

At webmonkey, there's an article on svg which was written before IE5 came out:
http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/9...html?tw=design
(5 pages, but easy to read; index of pages located at the left of the page)
Don't laugh when reading that; the author didn't know back then that svg would come across so many obstacles - svg sounded good back then. And apparently, MS was also in the project:

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The good news is that both Netscape and Microsoft are on board as co-authors of the specification, so browser support seems likely (page 5)

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Not anymore.

I wonder if support for svg (or any other new tech) should best come from the browser developers..?
E.g. Flash and Java aren't a complete failure. Is that perhaps because instead of the browsers supporting them, the techs support themselves by offering the user a plugin that can be downloaded in order to display the content correctly?
But I don't know if IE does support flash at some level (read: does not display flash in its native state, but allows the user to install a flash plugin).
If this is true, maybe it would be best to offer a plugin instead of waiting until all browser developers stop nagging and start rowing in the same direction. The rest is up to marketing & PR, as not all browser plugins are as popular as Flash & Java...

Although we're adding SVG export (first version, not complete yet) in the upcoming 3.2 release, I have to say that I agree its time has come, and gone. But it will remains an important standard for Linux platform for some long time.

In my opinion the reason it has no future is entirely down to Adobe - which is why it existed in the first place. Adobe wanted a competitor to Flash. Macromedia were their arch rival and had created a vector graphics standard that was beating Adobe at their own game. Adobe were not happy. Worse Adobe turned down the opportunity to buy Flash before Macromedia did, so this really stung. A big, big mistake that eventually costs them billions - literally.

So they needed to come up with a web based vector graphics standard - and the W3C wanted one as well (again because Flash was so successful, and as we all know Web graphics should have been vector from day one). So Adobe persuade W3C to accept their XML based web graphics competitor, despite the fact that it was a really, really poor spec (designed by committee, with all that implies, as you can tell from the 1000 page plus spec)

So wind forward 10 years, Adobe buys Macromedia when it realizes it has no option, pays billions to do so, mainly in order to get the increasingly dominant Flash (and Dreamweaver) while at the same time taking out the competitor (Freehand) in the illustration tool space (thank-you Adobe).

Now it's got what it wanted (Flash). Adobe can't admit publicly that it will abandon SVG (PR reasons), but it's obvious it has because it no longer needs it at all. It costs them (and us) a lot of money to support the standard going forward. So the first step in this is to tell the world that it will stop development of the SVG plug-in. You can't honestly expect them to put any further effort into it.

What's more Flash became an open standard (Macromedia did this to counter SVG actually, so at least it had one benefit).

Add the fact that browser support is utterly pathetic, that tool support for it is very weak, that Microsoft has a new competitor to Flash that's a lot better than SVG, namely XAML / Silverlight, and they are already showing browser plug-ins for this that work better than SVG. And not just on IE, but also Firefox and even the Mac. So even before it's officially released, Silverlight offers better cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility than SVG does, or ever will. So sorry, apart from the Linux market, SVG is EOL.

Hello, all;

I posted a partial response in another thread, but realized this is a much more appropriate one.

I repeat my question from that thread:

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If SVG is not [the web vector] standard, then what is the logical, standards-based, open alternative?

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The answer: there is none.

XAML is not a formally defined web standard. There are a number of contenders. In fact, it overlaps many existing standards, which will only serve to confuse the web market.

It is only cross-platform in the narrowest sense, in that Linux is not supported, and Mac support has been historically sketchy. It is more accurate to call it cross-browser.

Some feel it brings little new to the table, and others see it as part of a strategy to influence a shift back to Windows.

SVG enjoys good support in Firefox, and Safari can introduce it at will. The only critical exception is Internet Explorer.

My take? By abandoning SVG, we are consigned to another fight between corporate giants to gain captive markets using semi-proprietary 'standards'. The market will be fragmented, no one will really win, and we will not have a practical, standards-based web vector format for another dozen years.

Standards aren't perfect. SVG is far from it. But, web standards represent a fundamental leveling of the playing field. The web, free enterprise, and users all benefit when the smaller players have a chance to compete on the strength of their ideas.

-Ken

I think that you're being a bit premature in saying the SVG is dead, or 'EOL'.

People seem to expect these thing to either take over the world overnight, or be 'dead'. That's not how it is at all. For example, the USB specification was released by Intel in 1994 - 11 years ago - and USB 2.0 was released in 2000. I can remember this same discussions over USB during that time - what's the point, chicken and egg, USB is 'dead', no support for devices etc, etc... Intel just quietly kept on putting USB in every motherboard and chipset it made, for 10 years, while evangelising device makers. Then, all of a sudden, manufacturers realise that every computing device in the world's got a USB port. Then it suddenly takes off - now everything is USB - you can even get USB mug warmers. It's completely replaced SCSI, Parallel and Serial for device connection, in all areas.

SVG is now natively supported by Firefox, Opera and Safari (nearly - it's in the nightly builds and will be in 3.0), that means that it's natively supported by ~20-30% of people's browsers (http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php). Weather people realise it or not, the support is there and growing. I know it's not perfect by any means, but it's getting there. This is one of the excuses that Adobe used for killing their viewer - that's SVG's got browser support anyway.

Considering that Opera is pretty dominant in the mobile phone/device browser market (50 million+ handsets - http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/) and their mobile browsers also support SVG (including the ones that run on the Nintendo Wii and DS) - makes it all the more compelling. Opera want SVG because it's unbeatable for creating cross platform UI/Widgets for mobile devices. Open source developers want it because it's The Right Thing To Do, so it's in Firefox, KHTML (the engine used by Konqueror and Safari, eventually) and Linux (Cairo, etc..).

It's also true that open standards can't 'die' or become 'eol' - that's half the point, really. They can also grow and be adapted by anyone who wants to. The SVG spec's have, with the help of Wc3 members from Nokia, Ericsson and Sharp (amongst many others) been chopped up into much simpler 'profiles' suitable for different devices - one for mobile phones, one for pda's etc..

Thinking more strategically, it's also the case that having Xara be fluent in SVG (which is just XML - i.e. structured text) would get you most of the way toward XAML (which is also XML) and WPF/E - or Silverlight - Microsoft's new 'flash killer' - http://silverlight.net/

Once Xara can speak XML, it ought to be fairly simple to support both SVG and XAML, as they're both just XML/Text. This would allow Xara to create not only SVG but Silverlight graphics/application layouts (and possibly animation) and UI/graphics for Vista and .Net too - these are all done with XAML (i.e. XML), underneath.

Being just made of text inside, SVG/XAML are very ameanable to scripting and automation of workflows - something that Adobe was on the cusp of capitalising on before they bought the Flash religion. This allows lots of really interesting things to be done with statistical graphics, procedurally generated stuff, repurposing and localisation.

So, no I don't think that SVG is dead. If you look at the history of the internet thus far, it's the proprietary (VML, VMRL, GIF, ActiveX, VBScript, Xara's .WEB files) that turn into a blind allies and the open (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PNG, XML, SVG...?) that eventually win. There's a good argument that says that by supporting proprietary technology, you're basically guaranteeing that you're walking down a blind alley, eventually.

Dunc

I agree that SVG is still a viable format and will be more so in time. Much has been done with it. Google "SVG animation" and you will get some idea of what the format is capable of. What is missing is executables for building SVG animations. At this time they need to be built by hand... XML/SMIL is a lil daunting for the average web developer.

but, svg animations load MUCH more quickly being all text, no player is required (no "DOWNLOAD NOW", no "UPGRADE TO SVG PLAYER PRO", no automatic upgrade monitor app stuck into yer menu tray, etc, etc), no security holes.

Adobe has abandoned svg for perfectly understandable reasons. Bill's Credo: Why Build It When You Can Buy It? SOMEONE will build an app for the rest of us. I have faith.

geo.

Svg is great, since it is an open standard, since it is Xml, and since it is supported by many products. I don't know of any other object-oriented picture format that can compete with Svg is all these areas. Please implement both svg import and export.

SVG will remain alive with some artificial breathing assistance in LINUX machines.

It is barely noticeable now and I doubt if even half a percent of the World Graphics Artist even bother with it at all.

Yes, I think to become a standard a file type needs to reach a critical mass. SVG has never come close to this, perhaps due to a monopoly by swf files, and I can't see it happening now.

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