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This is a very good article, but there are a few things worth mentioning.
"Adobe's plugin, while a wonderful development, weighs in at a hefty 3MB or so download. ..."
High bandwidth is becoming more and more common and so the size of a plug-in is becoming less of a concern. However, our 3.0 beta offers a significant size reduction. At just over 2Mb, it is almost 30% smaller than our 2.0 release.
"There are two obvious obstacles to this (SVG adoption) happening: browser support and authoring tools."
As for the necessity for Microsoft or Netscape to support SVG, I do not believe that it is essential for them to support SVG for it to take off. Adobe Acrobat Reader, RealNetworks' RealPlayer, Macromedia Flash, and Apple's QuickTime are examples of technologies that have done quite well without being native to any browser. I expect SVG to be no different in this regard.
Aside from the substantial distribution that we will garner from the Real distribution mentioned in the article, Adobe has been distributing Adobe SVG Viewer with our products for almost a year and a half. I know that we are already well over 35 million distributed.
There is a lot to be said for adoption, but a lot more to be said for consistency between platforms AND adoption. To have real success, all implementations (including the major browser vendors and tools vendors) must implement SVG consistently. If HTML and JavaScript are any indicator, the results may not always be positive for Developers. Adobe plans to continue supporting the new Recommendation as we have for the last few years. While we are not yet 100% compliant, we will continue to strive to meet the bar set by the Recommendation. (Boy it feels good to drop the words "Draft," "Candidate," or "Proposed"!). We will also continue our efforts to include the platforms that our customers demand as we have demonstrated most recently in adding Windows ME, XP, and MacOSX. (for a complete list, see our SVG Web site (http://www.adobe.com/svg)
We are currently evaluating other platforms and will add them when our resources permit. (Our resources are not, unfortunately infinite.)
As for authoring tools, Adobe has been shipping SVG authoring tools for over a year now. There are short SVG tutorials for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe GoLive at: http://www.adobe.com/svg/indepth/pdfs/illusag.pdf and http://www.adobe.com/svg/indepth/pdfs/goliveag.pdf
This will help people learn some of the many things our tools already provide in the way of SVG authoring. I think Adobe is already providing a very nice tools suite for the new SVG Specification. We are not alone in this regard. There are over a hundred authoring tools and servers that produce SVG already available.
With the help of substantial industry partners like IBM, Sun, HP, Canon, Corel, ILOG, JASC, BitFlash, (see http://www.w3.org/2001/09/svg1-testimonial.html) Adobe looks forward to SVG becoming as commonplace as HTML.
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Michael Bierman
Senior Product Manager, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
mbierman@adobe.com http://www.adobe.com/svg
Adobe Systems - everywhere you lookTM
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