[Fsfe-uk] SVG - ReplaceFlash, was: BBC digital curriculum service in England

[Jim Ley]

[I just joined the list to comment on this discussion, hope you don't
me stepping in out of line]

Alex Hudson on Fri, 15 Oct 2004 10:53:00 +0100 wrote:
>On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 00:28 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
>> You've written that a few times, but did they drop it? The 1.7 README 
>> says it's new and "not yet enabled" in the mozilla.org builds.
>
>'Dropped it' in the sense of not actively wanting to support it,
>although not in the same way as the removal of MNG. ISTR that they were
>much more positive about SVG in the past.

Mozilla SVG drivers have never been particularly keen on SVG (if you
look at the individuals involved and the W3 lists etc. you might see
some reasons)  SVG support in Mozilla is coming along very well, it's
not up to the standard of ASV or Batik (Batik is a java implementation
from the Apache project, and is as good as the commercial ASV, except
a little slower)  Both of these (and mozila and KSVG from KDE with
some effort on the part of the author) are capable of producing the
sort of scripted animations we've seen in the thread.

>Non-free SVG support is derived from the Adobe plugin; on IE I
>understand this is quite an advanced plugin (windowless, fully
>scriptable, etc.) - this broke in Moz before version 1.0, I think. 

This has been fixed in Moz and other Netscape plugins for some time,
although it is no longer externally scriptable it does work.

>And
>while the rest of the world uses the Adobe system (which relies on
><embed>ing SVG, IIRC), the Moz approach is to inline SVG as a separate
>XML document using the namespaces thing (I assume this means you have to
>write XHTML, thinking about it ..). 

No, Mozilla whilst allowing mixed namespace documents, also works fine
with single namespace documents - not in embed, but embed is actually
rarely used in current SVG authoring - either not embedded or IFRAME
or OBJECT is commoner - there are problems with mozilla and existing
content, but this isn't really one of them.

The biggest problem as has been mentioned in this thread is authoring
tool support, whilst this is improving (the adoption of SVG as a
Mobile standard required by vodafone for all their phones has
increased the market for good tools) they still aren't there - and the
automatic conversion from flash, whilst vaguely working leads to very
poor SVG files due to the differing animation models.

Cheers,

Jim.