On 15 Jul 2005, at 9:54 am, Paul Ross wrote:
"The most important difference between Avalon and the current Windows
display architecture is that Avalon is vector based. The vector
structure allows scalable graphics (windows, fonts & icons), meaning
designers can specify shapes and objects onscreen instead of mapping
elements using pixels and x/y coordinates.
Apple (OS X, Core graphics), recent KDE (using SVG) and recent Gnome
already have this build.
What does all this mean for the web standards community? Am I reading
too much into this by thinking this is a seismic shift in the way we
could be building websites in the future? In particular - what are the
implications in the XHTML/CSS path versus something like Flash?
That will depend on what the browser supports. A webpage is not an
application.
SVG (and the canvas tag) is the obvious answer here.
Firefox nightly builds (and DeerPark dev. preview) already have full
SVG support build in.
Opera 8: idem (only SVG tiny, atm).
Safari and Webkit supports the canvas tag, SVG support (the patches
made by the KDE team) has landed recently in the CVS tree, meaning you
can already build Webkit with SVG support yourself.
Konqueror recent builds should support SVG as well.
Internet exploder: no support, except via the Adobe plugin. Maybe in
the elusive Longhorn.
As far as webstandards goes: no shift. You can use svg as a
background-image, or for a series of buttons, or...
Philippe
---
Philippe Wittenbergh
<http://emps.l-c-n.com/>
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