Article:		SVG: A Sure Bet
Subject:		State the current situation not just the possible future...
Date:		2003-07-17 18:11:03
From:		Paul Prescod
Response to: State the current situation not just the possible future...
Ethan says: "Get back to me when it does more than create zoomable maps" SVG already does animation, video, rendering of arbitrary XML, restyling and is fully scriptable and programmable. It is not even close to CGM. Ethan says: "YOU STILL NEED TO DOWNLOAD A COMPANY's PLUG-IN TO VIEW SVG." This is true, for now, if you do not already have the SVG viewer (which you will probably get as a side effect of downloading Acrobat once ASV6 ships). But SVG is being directly implemented in at least one browser: Mozilla. I can't predict if or when Microsoft will follow suit but we know that their Visio group is interested in SVG. Ethan says: "It does have promise but you need to be a little more honest on it's current state to the people in the trenches working with this stuff." The amazing thing about the response to the article is that I really meant to be clear that SVG is not ready to take on Flash yet: " It is already clear that SVG will own those markets long before it gets close to replacing Flash and PDF in their core markets"..."Note again how SVG can win without fighting Flash or PDF."

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• Mozilla "support" for SVG (State the current situation not just the possible future...)
  2003-07-18 08:42:12 Damian Cugley [Reply]
  
  Mozilla has, sadly, with the best possible intentions, put SVG support back several years.

  
  First, changes to the plug-in API made Mozilla incompatible with Adobe's SVG viewer 3.

  
  Second, the built-in SVG support does not handle a large subset of SVG, is missing many features.

  
  It does not help that the Mozilla plan for showing SVG in an HTML document is that the SVG code be mixed in with the HTML document, as opposed to living in a separate resource linked to with an 'object' or 'img' element. There is no way to write a document that will work with both these approaches.

  
  Mozilla is my regular web browser, but when I want to run SVG demos, I have to fire up Internet Explorer to do it. Sad.

  
  
  
  

  • Mozilla "support" for SVG (State the current situation not just the possible future...)
    2003-07-19 11:27:00 Paul Prescod [Reply]
    
    

    First, changes to the plug-in API made Mozilla incompatible with Adobe's SVG viewer 3.

    
    

    This has surely done more to hurt Mozilla than SVG. But anyhow, ASV6 will be released soon and that annoying period will be behind us.

    
    

    Second, the built-in SVG support does not handle a large subset of SVG, is missing many features.

    
    

    Standard-build Mozilla's do not have any SVG support and probably will not until the development has reached a more mature point. In the meantime, the plugin suffices.

    
    

    It does not help that the Mozilla plan for showing SVG in an HTML document is that the SVG code be mixed in with the HTML document, as opposed to living in a separate resource linked to with an 'object' or 'img' element. There is no way to write a document that will work with both these approaches.

    
    

    I expect that Mozilla will be able to display standalone SVG resources or OBJECT-embedded resources in addition to SVG mixed with HTML. But until the Mozilla implementation is mature it does not make much sense for Mozilla to prevent the Adobe implementation from handling OBJECT tags. Nevertheless, mixed namespace documents are undoubtably the future we should be working towards. That's what XML was designed to support and newer SVG features move more and more in that direction. It isn't an issue of either/or. We need both inline and out-of-line SVG.