Mark, i think you're right.
As you seem to know what's going on, please drop me a link for
http://svg.startpagina.nl when you have one.
Mark Fortner wrote:
Predicting the future is rather a black art at best, but gazing into my
crystal ball there are a couple of promising areas:
* The KDE group is working on a new desktop replacement called
Plasma which makes heavy use of SVG. This is sort of like
Konfabulator for Linux but based on SVG and scripting languages
like JavaScript, Ruby and Python. I've been tinkering around with
something similar in Java.
* Improved SVG tools seem to be making some headway. Although the
main area that's still lacking is scripting support in those
tools. I'm hopeful that with the advent of scripting language
support in Java, that the Java-based tools will find it easier to
add scripting support in SVG. My feeling is that if there are
free tools that can compete with Flash in-terms of functionality,
and ease-of-use, then it will be easier to attract developers to
the SVG language, and to projects like Batik.
* There's been a renewed focus on desktop Java in the past 18
months, and I'm hopeful that this will make it easier to do SVG
applet deployments that are as easy and as fast to load as Flash.
In a couple months we should see the release of the Consumer
version of Java which is lighter weight and supposedly faster to
load.
* We're still missing an SVG standard (or an extension to the
standard) that supports forms. This would definitely make it
easier for developers to create SVG-based user interfaces (as
opposed to pictures and animations). If we can create a standard
for set of widgets and stylesheets, this will definitely make this
easier to create skins and applications.
What tends to attract the development community is cool demos, and the
ability to get started without having to shell out a bunch of money.
Developers want to be able to create something whizzy over the weekend
and bring it in and show it off to the boss or to their peers. In order
to enable that kind of work, the tools and the widgets need to be in place.
Regards,
Mark Fortner
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