Hear, hear! Jeff, contact me offlist and I can give you some of my SVG eye-candy.
It seems like some Mozilla folks (with very notable exceptions) have a case of "not invented here" (where "here" is anywhere but the W3C). In the face of such a blatant bit of FUD, I feel I have to serve as an SVG apologist. Stop reading here if you're not in the mood for a... <rant> Some criticisms of SVG that Vladimir cites: * "Has scene DOM (SVG DOM, though)": "Has scene DOM"? No, it hasn't. SVG has a timeline-based animation mechanism; Flash is frame-based (which is more like scenes). And the SVG DOM *is* the DOM, with compatible extensions that allow for graphics-specific functions. Is he criticizing it because it uses graphical features? I suppose that SVG should be more like Canvas, which uses standard DOM methods like: beginPath(); moveTo(10, 90); lineTo(50, 10); lineTo(90, 90); lineTo(10, 90); stroke(); * SVG is "Somewhat hard to mix with HTML (not XHTML)" while Canvas "Behaves like an image in both": What's hard about using SVG with HTML? I've been doing exactly that for 6 years, and it's not hard... because it has a DOM. Is he talking about inline SVG? If so, it's natural that SVG shouldn't work as well as with XHTML, since HTML is not XML, and thus cannot have mixed namespaces. But the kicker is comparing that unfactoid with the apples-to-oranges non-DOM raster nature of canvas. Why are those on the same line? * "Difficult to do data-driven rendering... Need to do DOM manipulation for each change": First, only true with scripted changes, not declarative animation. Second, that's the *point* of the DOM.... to reflect the current state of the document! * "Complex to write by hand": Unlike Canvas... which is impossible to write by hand, since it's only an ephemeral scripted display. * "Spec tries to cover too much": Just wait until Canvas matures... when they try to meet a wider array of actual user needs, canvas will bloat like a dead fish. * "Multiple Profiles": Apparently, the intention of unifying devices of all types around a single Web is a bad idea... * "Tooltips? Audio/Video? Network IO??": HTML (a document description language) has tooltips, the object tag for multiple media types, and declarative server access (through forms). Is that a good thing...? Maybe not, but it met user needs, and the Web would not have been as successful without it. But, here's the question: how easy is it to get audio and video to work reliably (or at all) across browsers, without using some proprietary technology like Quicktime, Real, or Flash? So, even though HTML took a step toward supporting those things in some fashion (through the flawed "object" element), they still don't work 6 years after the HTML 4.01 Specification came out, because they were underspecified. SVG is inherently a multimedia language (raster, vector, and animation support were mandated from the original charter), and video is a natural extension of that mandate; it seems silly to leave out audio from that, doesn't it? SVG has worked to serve as a host language for the relevant parts of SMIL (since SMIL is only a hosted language), and these capabilities certainly make more sense in a graphics language than a text-document format. The case for network interfaces is less compelling, I agree... but it makes sense in a historical context. The SVG WG realized the need for innovation to help drive the creation of standards-based WebApps, and no other working group was chartered to do this work. DOM had lain fallow for years; in fact, it is only because of the initiative of the SVG WG in coordination with other forward-thinking groups (one of my favorites, XForms, included) that the new WebAPI working group was chartered to take up these necessary improvements to the existing DOM. As the WebAPI group takes on the task of such things as Cross-Domain XHR, the SVG Spec will defer to that specification instead, as it intends to do for the Wheel event (another long-unspecified bit of necessary Web infrastructure). Vladimir cites an "exhaustive" 4 bullets worth of existing documentation for SVG, leaving off svg.org and wiki.svg.org... Without trying to sound too bitter or unfair, while I am sure he knows canvas very well, he doesn't seem to know much about SVG. Finally, I note that they use the "<canvas>" affectation for Canvas, which obfuscates that it is, in fact, not XML, not DOM-based, and not intuitive or compatible with existing Web technologies. </rant> Okay, now that I've defused that little bomb of a presentation, let me state my real position on Canvas. I think Canvas is fine. I've seen some neat stuff done in Canvas, and look forward to seeing more. The Web is large, and I think that there is room for a variety of approaches to solving user needs, even if they overlap a bit. For one thing, Canvas does 3D, which SVG does only grudgingly, by design. I don't think this has to turn into a religious war, when it could be a set of complementary technologies. After all, they are both implemented natively in the same set of browsers, so everybody wins. In short, I don't see Canvas as competition to SVG.... after all, it doesn't have a Networking IO, and what's a graphics format without a Networking IO?? Regards- Doug Jeff Schiller wrote: | | http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/xtech2006/ | | About 5 slides on SVG and 14 on <canvas> (including some stuff on | Canvas3D). | | What got me about this presentation is the slide-pack has about 8 | slides with some really cool-looking <canvas> demos: a video game, a | plush web-stat chart, funky animations, colourful borders, widgets. | And in the whole slide-pack, only one single SVG example: a very | crude-looking chart made from the Dojo toolkit that looks like it was | produced by Excel 2.0. | | Where's the SVG love here? | | In my mind, the potential uses for SVG vastly outweighs those of | <canvas>, yet SVG seems to be losing mindshare left and right. Will | there be any mindshare left for SVG when WPF arrives? | | For my own sanity, can we get a list of cool SVG demos and experiments | that are out in the wild? I'd like links to these demos in one | central place (not multiple emails in a newsgroup) so we can point | people to one URL and say: Look, here are some cool examples of what | SVG can do. For this reason, I've started the "SVG Roadshow" post at | GetSVG.com: http://www.getsvg.com/general/announcements/svg_roadshow | | Thanks, | Jeff ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> You can search right from your browser? It's easy and it's free. See how. http://us.click.yahoo.com/_7bhrC/NGxNAA/yQLSAA/1U_rlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! 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