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April 30, 2003
SVG news
SVG news: I caught this Corel press release in InternetNews today because of a reference to Macromedia Flash, but it turns out there's a whole bunch of SVG news today: Corel has new servers and plugins... new Amaya is the first browser to include SVG support... SVG 1.2 proposal is interesting reading.
Corel SmartGraphics hit 1.0 release today. I saw their FAQ earlier today (can't reach it now... their servers are on-and-off), and it had the good story about separating presentation and content. I'm not sure of their free plugin's download size (starts with a 225K installer shim)... they've got an authoring tool which does static data-binding to UI elements (cool!), and then their server component apparently melds data and delivers a static file, similar to what Macromedia Generator used to do. The type of SVG they render isn't defined in the W3C SVG Conformance Suite yet, but you can get an idea of which features to use through Corel's Viewer tech docs.
The W3C has released a Working Draft for SVG 1.2, and it has tons of interesting feature proposals, ranging from the use of arbitrary XML data at runtime to construct graphics, to printing, to streaming and progressive rendering, to multiple screens ("pages")... even a video codec! They also make good mention of web services and constructing interfaces. After Working Draft stage, it next moves to Candidate Recommendation, then the actual Recommendation stage, and after people start making proprietary plugins to render all this, and then they can start on the hard work of getting that (those?) plugins into widespread distribution.
All of this has been done by the Macromedia Flash Player for quite awhile, of course, but it's still great to read an alternate take on similar feature proposals. If anything grabs you in that document then I'd be interested in hearing here, and the Flash development team always appreciates direct feature requests too. But check out the SVG 1.2 Working Draft feature proposals... if you're interested in this stuff, it's good reading.
The Amaya browser is a useful tool to have in your toolchest, because it handles documents according to the W3C's specifications. It's also a read/write browser, true to the original aim of the collaborative web. In the 8.0 distribution, released today, "Amaya supports also a subset of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, namely basic shapes, text, images, and foreignObject (the latter is useful to include HTML fragments or MathML expressions in drawings)." This functionality seems similar to what you can get from SVG-in-Flash, through work like that from Helen Triolo or Claus Wahlers, but I haven't compared feature-by-feature to see which comes closer to the W3C's ideal SVG behavior. Anyway, this is the first browser which enables at least some SVG rendering in its default configuration.
People often compare SVG to SWF... although inaccurate, it's understandable because analogies make things easier to initially comprehend... it's like how the term "horseless carriage" helped in getting across the idea of the automobile. I'm convinced that an XML format for describing vector graphics is a good ability to have, even though most of the "SVG vs SWF" arguments I see seem a little weird and blinkered to me.
Posted by John Dowdell at April 30, 2003 12:49 PM
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Comments
John,
Thanks for providing the Flash community with SVG information. However I would hope you'd make a better job in reporting SVG 1.2 progress instead of boldly and inaccurately claiming that "all of this has been done by the Macromedia Flash Player for quite awhile, of course". I posted an answer to this post on my own blog, I hope that you'll read it and correct the claims that you make.
Antoine
Posted by: Antoine Quint at April 30, 2003 03:26 PM
?? I didn't say that everything proposed for the SVG 1.2 spec was already available to the world today through the Macromedia Flash Player... I noted specific new feature proposals up there. Check it again... live XML-to-graphics, multiple screens, printing, streaming, video, web services, UIs... all of this is indeed being done today in Flash.
(To believe the strawman argument you advance of "he said swf can already do all svg proposes" would render my next paragraph incomprehensible, where I ask for change-requests to SWF.)
Posted by: jd at April 30, 2003 03:45 PM
John,
Thereare some substantial factual inaccuracies in you commentary, I hope you will correct them. Amaya is not the first (or only) browser with SVG support. Mozilla, XSmiles, KSVG, IceBrowser ... and Amaya! have done this for a while.
Because this release of Amaya is not the first Amaya version to have SVG support, either. This version just improves on the existing support and the existing ability to mix SVG, XHTML and MathML in the one XML document.
Incidentally the DENG 'SVG in Flash' implementation can .... draw a rectangle. Ok for a one day experiment. Once it improves to covera moderate amount of the spec, it may become interesting. Currently, the amount of work required to compare it to other implementations is not exactly onerous right now ;-)
You also have the order of stages along the W3C Rec track incorrect and the point at which implementations are solicited incorrect, but there are only so many of your errors that I can correct in one comment...
Posted by: Chris Lilley at May 1, 2003 02:58 AM
Wow, I see I did make an error there... please change this:
"...this is the first browser which enables at least some SVG rendering in its default configuration."
to this:
"... this is the first browser (that anyone has ever heard of, at least) which enables at least some SVG rendering in its default configuration."
(The Mozilla project has had a workgroup for a couple of years to try to render SVG 1.0, but it too does only a subset, and it's not included in the default Mozilla configurations.)
Chris: "You also have the order of stages along the W3C Rec track incorrect and the point at which implementations are solicited incorrect."
Nope... if you'll re-read what you critiqued you'll see:
Me: "After Working Draft stage, it next moves to Candidate Recommendation, then the actual Recommendation stage, and after people start making proprietary plugins to render all this, and then they can start on the hard work of getting that (those?) plugins into widespread distribution." There are two chains in there, in varying degrees of parallelism... not one.
I also think you're short-selling Claus's work with DENG. He has put a lot of effort into making proposals actually viewable in the world. What he and Helen have done in their separate projects is indeed comparable to Amaya's own (2.0!?!) support for a subset of SVG spec: "basic shapes, text, images, and [arbitrary markup]."
But I hadn't heard about browsers named "XSmiles, KSVG, IceBrowser" before, thanks for the tip.
Posted by: jd at May 1, 2003 12:29 PM