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Of course any interchange format is going to lose some details of the native formats. It is quite rare to find one that does not. And yet we still make heavy use of them. When you cut and paste from one application to another you usually go through RTF or ASCII text which loses things. But people still cut and paste. If you want to integrate graphics from GIS software with graphics from a charting package, SVG will preserve everything that you could reasonably expect it to preserve. As the article said:
"SVG will also become the interchange syntax for all sorts of industry-specific or corporation-specific data visualization systems, from maps of oil fields to architectural designs to molecular models. It will not replace the native XML data vocabularies for these things, but it will allow them to be rendered to a single display format so that disparate types of image can be integrated into unified graphical applications delivered through web browsers."
But I will defer to the experts: "SVG has emerged as the new high fidelity vector graphic standard for the Web. Dozens of applications have developed or announced their intent to support the SVG format. This made SVG a natural candidate as the Visio team evaluated alternatives for exchange of Vector graphics with other applications going forward."
And:
"Over many releases, the Visio team had built or acquired import and export 'filters' for a large array of foreign graphic formats. Many of these were proprietary formats of competing products. In Visio 2002 release, the number of formats supported for import, export or both had reached 27 formats, 12 of which were proprietary formats of other products --- some of which had already announced they would be supporting SVG. The Visio team decided to deprecate support for a number of older formats and to add a single new format that would be supported by a wide array of other products --- SVG."
Richard See,
Lead Program Manager ? Advanced Technology Teams,
Microsoft Office Visio, Microsoft Corp.
http://www.svgopen.org/2003/papers/SVG_Scenarios_using_Microsoft_Office_Visio_2003/#S2.2
You asked whether I see some of the same issues with SVG that I do with SOAP. I think that SVG could and should be modularized more. The Tiny and Basic profiles are a good start but just a start. Yes, I think that the SVG community has to wrestle more with issues of profiling, subsetting, customization and interoperability, but I have a lot more faith in their common understanding of their problem domain than I do for SOAP.
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