[thelist] Here comes SVG (was: Free Flash charts?)

Richard Bennett richard.bennett at skynet.be
Sun Jul 21 04:04:01 CDT 2002


Hi,
I was lucky to be one of the presenters at the 2002 SVG Open in Zurich last
week.
It was quite an experience, there were over 200 companies and universities
present, from more than 25 countries worldwide.
There was a lot of enthusiasm, and it was pretty cool to see all the
different implementations and uses people had found for SVG.

That brings up the first point - SVG is a standard, free for companies to
implement if they need a rich way to describe a 2d graphics canvas.
This means they don't need to waste time writing up specs for their own
proprietary graphics interface, they can use what's out there - free.

One of the first to do this was Adobe, who released the free browser plugin,
currently at version 3, and still the most widely used SVG implementation on
the desktop.
http://www.adobe.com/svg/
This is what people often compare to Flash (player, not authoring
environment)
Some Flash advantages:
* It's authoring tool is far more advanced than similar tools available for
SVG (which are mostly only v1 or preview releases as of yet)
* It's plugin size is far smaller. (Adobe don't seem to think this is a
major problem, as they had a lot of success with the PDF plugin, which is
larger still.)
* It's plugin runs faster. Some benchmarking should be done on this, but I
get the impression Flash plugin will render large files faster. Sadly many
Flash developers have no idea about the medium's restrictions, and manage to
slow many 500mhz computers to a crawl with their multiple nested animations.
* Flash player is still more widely available, on the desktop.
Although Adobe's viewer is distributed with all their products, including
PDF viewer, and the penetration is estimated at around 38% of www users,
many will still have the older v2 player, so links to upgrade are important.

For me SVG's main advantages were:
* It's an XML standard - what you learn authoring SVG can easily be re-used
in many XML situations.
* It mixes very well with scripting languages, both on the server, and the
client.
For instance, if you want a dynamic bar-chart, your server-side script could
simply spit out this:

Response.ContentType = "image/svg+xml";
Response.Write("<?xml version='1.0' standalone='no'?>
    <!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.0//EN'
     'http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd'>
    <svg width='500' height='500'>
         <rect x='50' y='50' width='100' height='16'/>
         <rect x='50' y='70' width='150' height='16'/>
         <rect x='50' y='90' width='120' height='16'/>
         <rect x='50' y='110' width='60' height='16'/>
    </svg>")

Adjusting the "width" values to reflect the values as needed.
Name the file something like this:
www.myserver.com/test.asp?IEHack=.svg

You can just as easily do this using XSLT, Perl, php etc.
* Adobe's viewer, and others, allow traffic to and from the server from
within your SVG file, using Javascript.
This way you can allow your bar-Chart to update as you watch it, for
instance.
* You code is re-usable - more and more SVG implementations are becoming
available every-day. What you learn, and code, today, will be usable on PDA
or mobilephone today too.


Another nice SVG implementation is Batik ( http://xml.apache.org/batik/ )
This is a Java application, that doesn't run in the browser, it is basically
a set of tools that can be used to build SVG applications.
An SVG browser, Squiggle, is also included.
Batik is currently almost at the same level of implementing the SVG spec as
Adobe's plugin, bar the SMIL animation.

The real news comes from the PDA and mobile market, here are some:
http://protocol7.com/svg-wiki/ow.asp?ViewerImplementations
Especially Hitachi and KDDI labs have an amazing mobile-phone with
SVG-enabled display out in Japan.
In the 3rd generation now, and over 1.000.000 pieces sold so far!
It includes GPS tracking, giving you directions as you walk!
Paper:
http://www.svgopen.org/papers/2002/shimada_masaru_sitama__geospatial_infoser
vices_for_mobiles/index.html

So yes, SVG is a young and evolving standard, but also one that has proven
it's worth.
It's being used more and more, on and off the web.

And no, it's not *better* than Flash/SWF, and Flash isn't *better* than
SVG - they're both tools for your use, and each has a place.
It would be nice if Macromedia would stop putting SVG down as simply being a
file-exchange format though... marketing though, I guess.

If you're interested in my paper on GPS tracking using SVG, it's here:
http://www.svgopen.org/papers/2002/bennett__gps_tracking_with_svg/index.html

Sorry for the long post,
Cheers,
Richard Bennett.

----- Original Message -----
From: "jon steele" <jjsteele22 at yahoo.com>

Anyone else care to comment?






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