[thelist] SVG versus Flash?

John Dowdell jdowdell at macromedia.com
Fri Dec 7 17:28:46 CST 2001


First off: Use whatever gets your project done, makes your client happy.... ;-)


At 1:21 AM 12/6/1, Joergen Ramskov wrote:
> Proprietary may not be the best word, but I still think it is
> important to know that Flash is a Macromedia product, SVG is an
> W3C recommendation. This means that SVG probably will be supported
> directly in future browsers (there is limited support in Mozilla
> already if you enable it), while Flash will forever need the Flash plugin.

The Macromedia Flash Player has been included in the Netscape browsers for
years, has been distributed with and is now embedded with the Microsoft
browsers and operating systems, is distributed with the Opera browser and
other software. It's already there.

There are various SVG rendering engines, but only the proprietary Adobe
plugin has any measurable distribution. Microsoft has shown no signs of
putting SVG in. Mozilla is working on an eventual subset of SVG features:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

(The SVG file format may be designed by committee, but the Adobe SVG Plugin
Source Code is not published or open... that's the big distinction here,
between a file format definition and an actual usable implementation. Just
because a committee agrees after awhile on a file format definition,
doesn't mean that they'll include someone's proprietary implementation for
it in their own software.)

For context, PNG was the very first W3C Recommendation, 'way back in 1996.
It didn't become an ISO Standard like VRML did. Merely specifying a graphic
format is not sufficient to actually view it, much less view it in any
predictable way.

But in your project it sounds like you can mandate what software people
install, so you have more freedom than common in web design.

jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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