
SVG Is The Future Of Application Development - astrec
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/22/svg-is-the-future-of-application-development/
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GHFigs
I don't follow any line of thinking that presumes widespread adoption of
anything on the basis of HTML/CSS/JS being inconvenient or impure. As if that
has ever stopped us. Time has shown that the collective energy of a million
developers butting their heads up against those limitations is enough to keep
things moving forward an inch at a time. The web is a messy and inconsistent
place and will undoubtedly remain so for a long time to come.

As for Silverlight and AIR, well, they might taste like pumpkin pie, but I
wouldn't know, etc.

( p.s. for anybody using WebKit nightlies: <http://webkit.org/blog-
files/animation-demo.svg> )

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senthil_rajasek
Considering the standard has been in development
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svg>) since 1999 (10 years ??) this is a sad
state... the future of app development?

The article thankfully mentions IE exactly once. Microsoft does not officially
support SVG, you need a plugin.

Even Chrome does not support the SVG 1.1 standard fully, as per the wikipedia
article.

Browsers need a standard, natively supported graphics library sigh...

~~~
zupatol
The raphael library he writes about looks interesting, it uses vml for
internet explorer and svg elsewhere.

I had never heard about vml. According to wikipedia it is used by google maps
as a replacement for svg in ie. That surprised me too: svg is actually being
used by a very useful site.

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miktro
I tried using SVG many years ago - but had to give up due to its lack of
adoption and support by browsers. What finally killed it for me was Adobe
announcing they were dropping development and support for their (aging) SVG
viewer.

So I looked around - and turned to Silverlight, which is unusual for me as I
normally avoid Microsoft technology on the philosphical principle that it will
be closed, proprietary, idiosyncratic, designed for someone with a very
strange view of reality and incredibly inconsistent from one version to the
next. But \- Silverlight is XML - no nasty binary objects in the nackground,
\- it implements .NET - which is close to a language standard and could easily
become one \- it looks like the sort of thing that wold not be too hard for
other platforms to implement \- and Microsoft might out their resources behind
making it a wide-support platform \- and did I mention that it's pure XML. How
cool is that!

SVG is ok, but very awkward to use in applications, and it was designed in a
world where the verb 'to gooogle' did not exist.

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pmjordan
One context in which I've tested SVG is together with XUL, running on Firefox.
The combination is brilliant for complex UI and makes you wish it was more
widely supported.

~~~
iigs
Got a screenshot or something public? I think XUL is interesting and would
love to do some app development with it, but I keep coming back to worse is
better and HTML is good enough.

~~~
pmjordan
I've not got anything I made that I could point you at without a bit of work,
although I was originally inspired to try the combination by an article [1] in
German magazine c't. Source code for the example from the article is
downloadable. [2] It's a simple calendar/timetable app, and they've built the
calendar display in SVG, and the rest of the UI in XUL. It uses PHP & MySQL
server side and should hopefully make some sense even if you don't know
German.

[1] <http://www.heise.de/kiosk/archiv/ct/2008/5/202_kiosk>

[2] ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/0805-202.zip

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simonw
I'm still hoping someone will release a solid SVG renderer written in Flash or
Flex. There are a few projects that are most of the way there, but it would be
really neat to have a feature complete one for SVG Tiny which allowed you to
reliably render SVG graphics in IE.

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stuntgoat
Check out the capabilities of the specification.

<http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/>

It appears I just discovered a valuable, free, resource with untapped
potential.

Happy Hacking!

~~~
kragen
SVG itself has no good implementations. Does SVG mobile?

Writing a specification with awesome capabilities is a lot easier than writing
the software.

~~~
stuntgoat
<http://code.google.com/p/svgfig/>

I just found this one.

Cheers!

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diN0bot
worthwhile comment by jonathansnook: "The problem with the current state of
HTML is that it’s elements for interactivity are quite limited without
JavaScript. We have a limited set of form elements and then we fall back to
the page request/response of old.

This is a problem that SVG does not solve. Sure, it might make certain
presentation elements easier to create but that’s more of a CSS issue than an
HTML issue.

This is something that HTML5 is trying to address with additional input types.
We’ll still need JavaScript though to mimic more common complex desktop
interactions like tree structures and tri-state inputs."

~~~
newt0311
A more pressing problem with SVG is that it is like every other W3C standard:
bloated, unwieldy, and obfuscated. Not to mention that SVG does not have all
the capabilities of PS. PS is a complete turing complete language specialized
for drawing vector graphics. SVG is more restricted and certainly slower to
work with, not as well supported, and very very verbose.

~~~
jsrn
> [...] and very very verbose

it's possible to write compact SVG. For example, it has a simple and very
compact sub-language for specifying paths (with one-letter commands):
<http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/paths.html#PathDataBNF>

What do you mean by 'not as well supported'? SVG is supported by Firefox,
Opera and Webkit (Safari / Chrome). I'm not aware of any Browser that supports
Postscript.

As for turing complete: SVG is fully scriptable with Javascript, which is
turing complete and built-in in every browser.

~~~
newt0311
Every linux box in existence supports PS, very well. So does every PDF reader.
That covers over 80% of all computers. Extending this support could be done
through a plugin. Compare this to the fact that IE does _not_ support SVG and
PS is a far better standard to work with in terms of vector drawing.

As to the turing completeness of SVG, how efficiently can JS transform vectors
in comparison to PS. Not very fast.

Also, nobody wants to draw just paths.

~~~
ralph
"So does every PDF reader."

I don't think every PDF reader supports PostScript very well. Is that what you
meant to say?

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volida
if you need to support technology that brakes combaticility because you think
thats the future and thats what stands between you and your productivity or
success you may as well use flash which happens to be available today and
cross platform.

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wizlb
I'm looking forward doing more Silverlight + C# than anything else.

~~~
Flemlord
Ditto. And in the business world, like it or not, desktop applications are
often still a factor. The promise of building Silverlight web pages in C# and
being able to reuse them in a WPF desktop application is exciting.

