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January 12, 2007
Skype, Venice, SVG
Skype, Venice, SVG: Om Malik offers some vendor-certified kimono-opening on The Venice Project, something video-ish from people connected with Skype. I'll wait to see it myself, but this line caught my eye: "The user interface is built using Adobe's SVG technology." As most SVG evangelists will remind, the various SVG specs were consortium efforts, not driven solely by Adobe. But if this project uses the Adobe SVG Viewer as a renderer, then that would be an odd choice... although it's still the most popular SVG-full renderer, it was end-of-life'd last year... it's pretty clear which other Adobe clientside renderer has the performance and feature range needed today. I'm not sure what the line "UI built using Adobe's SVG" might mean.
Posted by JohnDowdell at January 12, 2007 08:00 AM
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"UI built using SVG" means that the user interface of this product is written using SVG, with JavaScript and the DOM providing the user interaction and scripting layer. The renderer used is Mozilla's native implementation, which uses the cross-platform Cairo rendering library as a back-end.
[jd sez: Hi Antoine! I saw you later in one of Om's comments sections. How do you know which renderer the Skype folk intend to use? (I'm also guessing it's actually the upcoming Mozilla implementation, rather than Adobe rendering code.)]
SVG is not the only technology used for the user interface, although it is the most used. XUL, XHTML and CSS are also used. This product is a great proof that XML-based markup technologies are ideal to create internet-integrated desktop applications.
I assume you hint at the Flash Player as potential renderer for this. Using only pure XML-based technologies allow to use a single object model and scripting APIs (the DOM), which is tremendously useful, Flash does not integrate as seamlessly unfortunately, and Apollo, as it looks, will not fill the gap either.
Posted by: Antoine Quint at January 12, 2007 08:28 AM
I'm working for The Venice Project, and more specifically on the user interface implementation. We are using the latest trunk efforts from Mozilla, as available from any Firefox 3.0 nightly build, plus modifications on our own to leverage hardware acceleration when available, which we are looking into contributing to the project.
[jd sez: Cool! Then you actually *know*! :) ]
Posted by: Antoine Quint at January 12, 2007 08:35 AM
Antoine, just curious, what video codec are you using? same as skype?
Posted by: tw at January 12, 2007 09:37 AM
I have no idea what video codec Skype uses, but Om Malik's article mentions which coded The Venice Project uses:
"The company uses a H.264 codec licensed from CoreCodec, a US-based company"
Posted by: Antoine Quint at January 12, 2007 11:09 AM