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February 02, 2007
SVG-T press release
SVG-T press release: Multiple wacky things in this press release from firm Ikivo, which creates their own proprietary renderer of the W3C's slowly evolving SVG-Tiny format. The line that triggered me to post: "[Ikivo] said that the figure for the open technology shipped with devices to be almost twice that of Adobe's proprietary Flash unit shipments of 115m." They estimate 225 million phones have some level of support, 65% of which include one of Ikivo's proprietary SVG-T engines, and I see no realworld conformance testing of how those proprietary implementations of the consortium's specification compare. Key takeaway is that Adobe's Flash Lite engine is simply greater in scope than SVG-T, proven by how Flash Lite is available to manufacturers with a built-in SVG-T renderer (although I don't know of any manufacturers who have actually settled for SVG-T if SWFs were available). The emerging Adobe Flash Cast service goes even further in scope beyond drawing circles on the screen, and has been stunningly successful in regions where mobile adoption is advanced enough to support it. I don't mind SVG itself -- I think XML-based representations of simple graphics are an essential technology -- but I object to such "proprietary" dismissals in pursuit of marketing awareness.
Posted by JohnDowdell at February 2, 2007 10:46 AM
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... awaiting arrival of Antoine Quint, countdown, 5... 4... 3... 2...
(And yup, I know the Ikivo site uses SWF, but that's fine, why shouldn't they?)
Posted by: John Dowdell at February 2, 2007 10:48 AM
I'll give Antoine a break today... I hope that readers of this blog understand John's bias towards Flash. John often reminds us of valid points about the weaknesses in SVG-T, but it's not all black and white. For example:
In my past tenure at Openwave, many OEMs and carriers required both SVG Tiny and Flash support in the handset for content and application UI. They weren't willing to ship without SVG Tiny.
Macromedia really, really needs to objectively show the quality of their SVG Tiny support vs. others. I agree that a realworld conformance suite is needed, but until then, there is the W3C feature conformance suite. An engine's SVG Tiny support can vary widely; it's one thing to implement still-image SVG Tiny, and completely another to support animated SVG Tiny.
This is still a mostly academic debate. There's still fierce SVG-T and Flash marketing going on, and for consumers, will ultimately benefit from the healthy competition.
I think it's much more interesting to consider what's next... beyond both SVG and Flash, as that is where I think this battle for rich media platforms will move to.
Posted by: Charles at February 2, 2007 12:06 PM