Since batik/SVG may become very important in a product I'm working on,
I'd like to try to get some idea of both the future of Batik, and more
generally, of what people think are the prospects for SVG. This sort of
question is both open-intended and (unfortunately) contentious, so I
apologize in advance if I seem to be implying any doubts about technical
merits or abilities of products or people, or if this starts any
mini-flame wars. That's not my intention. SVG technology, if it matures
properly and becomes widely adopted, will definitely make my life much
better, and I'd like to get a sense as the the likelihood of that
happening. (Sadly, many good technologies don't succeed, and many bad
ones do.)
Some of my Batik questions are:
1) How active is Batik development, and is it becoming more or less
active as time goes on?
2) How widely used is Batik?
3) Do the core developers anticipate continued significant work on
Batik, and is there a rough timeline as to what is intended over the
next few years?
I hope it's OK if I ask similar questions about SVG here; it seems like
a group where people would have worthwhile opinions. So here are some
SVG questions:
1) Do people see SVG being adopted into mainstream use at all (in
their own companies, or in products they use)? Or is it still basically
being used by programming enthusiasts/researchers, without a significant
commercial/end-user base?
2) Is SVG 1.1 (which is I believe what Batik implements, for the
most part) mature, in that it has no glaring deficiencies that make it
difficult to use in real situations? I've only started looking at SVG
again after many years, and SVG 1.0 certainly did have glaring
deficiencies, in particular when it came to handling multiline text
(which is why I abandoned it at the time). It appears 1.1 has fixed
that--are there other serious problem areas that apply to "common case"
uses in 1.1?
3) What is the status of integration of SVG into browsers and other
end-use applications? I ask because, from what I can tell, Adobe once
supported SVG in Acrobat (this is just from reading various archived
messages during my SVG research, so please correct me if I'm wrong) and
has announced that it does not plan to do so in the future; it'd be nice
to know this isn't an industry trend.
All in all, I'm actually much more concerned about the future of SVG
than of Batik; if SVG does well, I'm sure Batik will too. As I say, I
haven't been following SVG for a number of years, so I don't know if
it's been a slowly-maturing technology that is poised for more
widespread use, or a promising technology that is simply unable to gain
critical mass. The feedback of more active SVG users is most appreciated.
Thanks,
Ken
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