[thelist] SVG - who ? what ?

Adrian Simmons adrian at cubitum.co.uk
Fri Jun 15 04:11:37 CDT 2001


>I've been surfing the Adobe (http://www.adobe.com) site all morning in
>search of SVG (scalable vector graphics). What i can't seem to figure out is
>what the difference between SVG and flash/livemotion is.
SVG and Flash are both vector based graphic formats.

They are different from each other.

Both currently require browser plugin's, but the flash plugin has 
much much higher 'market' penetration.

Macromedia's Flash software outputs to Flash format (amongst others), 
but Adobe LiveMotion can output to Flash or SVG (amongst others).

Flash is a proprietary Format owned my Macromedia (though I believe 
they've made some efforts to open up the format with their Flash 
SDK). In contrast SVG is on the way to becoming a W3C recommendation:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8

In my own very limited experimentation LiveMotion created SVG files 
were massive compared Flash files of the same graphic (5 times the 
size?) - I've no idea whether that has to do with LiveMotion or the 
SVG format, or just the particular graphic I was using.

This might help with your understanding:
http://www.moock.org/webdesign/svg/articles/svg-vs-flash.html

In theory future browsers will use XML/XHTML, CSS, SMIL and SVG - in 
practice Micro$oft will probably release their own Vector based 
graphics format and wipe out the competition :)

-- 
Adrian

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