[thelist] Where is SVG? And where stands SVG in comparison to Flash?

Balazs Dianiska b.dianiska at sms.ed.ac.uk
Fri Dec 19 16:11:28 CST 2008


On 18 Dec 2008, at 15:36, Victor Augusto de Campos wrote:

> Actually I'm developing some complex applications using SVG/VML and so
> far it still VERY limited in many browsers, rendering failures are
> common, far as common than I would expect nowadays, the KSVG renderer,
> used by most Webkit-based browsers, is filled with bugs, especially
> when you try to dynamic generate animations, transformations to the
> shapes, etc; the VML renderer has some limitations too, I found that
> when you try to redraw a more complex path by dynamically changing
> it's path-string (sorry, don't know how to call the attribute which
> actually sets the path shape) the render fails and oddly draws the
> shape until the final action, where it magically draw the correct
> path.
> Sincerely, it's still quite frustrating developing such things :/

Yeah I would agree there. As someone who worked on an SVG abstraction  
layer for Drupal last year my experience was that this technology is
a) not supported by browsers properly
b) a standard going into the wrong direction regarding features to  
offer.

The lack of IE support hurts a lot, the inconsistency of small  
rendering differences in Opera/webkit/ff are very annoying from a dev  
point of view. No mention of layers yet, but oh yeah lets have  
multimedia embedding! No positioning of text, but lets have ogg (!)  
audio playing capabilities.

As far I am concerned it was a good idea now completely derailed. Use  
flash (flex!) if you want to deploy within the next decade.

Balazs



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