[thelist] SVG - who ? what ?

John Dowdell jdowdell at macromedia.com
Fri Jun 15 19:53:05 CDT 2001


At 1:35 AM 6/14/1, Jelle Desramaults wrote:
> What i can't seem to figure out is what the difference
> between SVG and flash/livemotion is.

SVG is a file format, like SWF, while Macromedia Flash and Adobe's
LiveMotion are both applications which produce SWF files. (Neither
application produces SVG files.)

The main SVG page is here:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/


At 1:44 AM 6/15/1, Eric Cestari wrote:
> SVG and Flash have the same goals, being  the vector
> graphic standard.

mmm, I'm not so sure... SWF files have used vector graphics over the past
five years or so, true, but the real focus is on widespread display of
predictable interfaces. The embedded interactivity engine and 200K
footprint are probably more important than the vectors by this point.

(SVG's main "goal" would likely be to become a 1.0 recommendation, and then
to have a variety of proprietary renderers in realworld distribution so
such files could be viewed. I can't speak for others, though, and so would
defer to the link above.)


> SVG is an XML application whereas Flash is in proprietary format
> (though the API is available freely).

Small point here... the Macromedia Flash Player has an API, where browsers
or applications can pause, play, zoom and send messages to a SWF.

That's distinct from the SWF file format being publicly documented... I've
lost count at about 50 applications writing SWF via these specs:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/licensing/fileformat/

(The distinction here is between the API to an application, and the
specification of a file format. I understand the phrase "xml application"
as a distinct meaning... gosh, this gets confusing. ;-)

Both the SVG and SWF file formats are publicly documented, although one is
designed by committee and the other designed by a single company. Both file
formats rely on a range of proprietary renderers to display such content.

If you're interested in free serverside generation of SWF files, then
people do offer various implementations:
http://www.swift-tools.com/
http://www.flashgap.com/
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.swf.php



At 8:50 AM 6/15/1, Denis, David wrote:
> Experiment builds of Mozilla have SVG support rolled in.
> Eventually SVG support should come as part of the
> browser, being just another way to handle XML.

Actually, here's the source page, where you can judge for yourself:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

(I'm not sure whether that date is August 12 or December 8, but either way,
there doesn't seem to ahve been much action there recently.)

I do not know of Microsoft's plans, but I do know that most of their
distributions include the tiny SWF renderer already, and I haven't heard of
them making their own SVG renderer, or using Adobe's SVG renderer, or
bundling someone else's SVG renderer. (Microsoft's VML language is being
used in some of its applications today.)


I personally think that SVG is a very reasonable file format, and could be
a useful file format, particularly for data exchange among graphics
applications. For distributed viewing, however, the big problem is
distributing the viewers, and the order-of-magnitude size differences
between renderers seem to make this a foregone conclusion...?

jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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