Welcome to TalkGraphics.com
Results 1 to 10 of 16

Threaded View

  1. #11
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Posts
    12

    Default Re: SVG. The way forward or a blind alley?

    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
    Last edited by dflock; 31 May 2007 at 04:10 PM.
    IP

 

 

Tags for this Thread

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •