[thelist] SVG versus Flash?

[Joergen Ramskov]

> From: Erik Mattheis <gozz at gozz.com>
> Subject: Re: [thelist] SVG versus Flash?
> 
> The only reasons to use SVG would be that you already know it and 
> ensuring that your app will work on users machine is a non-issue. 
> Making text look as crisp as thebrain.com's applet is tricky in 
> Flash, but if crisp aliased text important, the hassle to do it would 
> seem small compared to dealing with the reaction when you say, "Here 
> it is! It's SVG!"

Is it hard to make "easy to read" text in Flash? It is not a product that
would be used by millions of users, it's for a limited audience. Furthermore
- I don't see it as a huge problem that they need to install a plugin? Flash
needs to be installed too - yes, Flash is installed on a lot of PC's, but is
it installed on business PC's too?
 
> Not wanting to start a nauseating discussion, but clearing up the 
> misinfo posted to this thread:
> 
> >Bad (Flash): It's proprietary
> 
> The SWF format has been open for years (http://www.openswf.org/ ) ... 
> there are plenty of non-Macromedia tools to create SWFs that play in 
> MM's free Flash Player.

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. 
 
> >SVG can easily be created by ASP, PHP, Perl or whatever, and 
> extracted from a database.
> 
> Anything that can be shown by the Flash player can be created/updated 
> via a database ... you just need to produce text files with the 
> backend software of your choice.

Okay - is it easy? How do you do it with ex. java?
 
> >* It [SVG] has a built-in ECMA-script (javascript) engine, so you 
> >don't have to
> >code per browser, and you don't need to learn Flash's action-script.
> 
> Same thing with ActionScript on all counts minus learning 
> ActionScript, which IS ECMAscript compliant ... if you know 
> JavaScript, learning ActionScript is just a matter of getting 
> familiar with the Flash specific methods and properties.

Well, I need to learn even less with SVG, correct?

Thanks for your input.

--
Joergen Ramskov