Richard Lewis wrote:
On Monday 01 October 2007 15:35:12 Mark Rogers wrote:
Is there anything much flash can do that SVG can't? Is there a good reason SVG hasn't caught on?
SVG is only for vector graphics;
See http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/comparison_flash_svg/ for a comparison of features. Most people don't realise that SVG has a pretty much equivalent feature set to Flash and is a W3C recommendation. It's just there are no widespread implementations yet!
It doesn't have the audio and video features of Flash, but requiring a vector graphics plugin to view video (like YouTube does) really makes no sense to me. We have other formats for audio and video like the ogg standards and I'm pretty sure they can be embedded inside an SVG document? It's a bit like saying that ODF doesn't have math markup but OOXML does. ODF uses an existing ISO standard but OOXML re-invents the wheel with a completely new method.
It does have the advantage, however, of being a well-formed XML document and is therefore more easily indexable by search engines, readable with non-supporting browsers, and scriptable with ECMAScript. (Imagine rich SVG applications with liberal dollops of XMLHttpRequest goodness. Mmmm.)
Exactly! In my opinion Flash is one of the most broken things about the web at the moment, which is a shame because it's driving some of the most innovative new services on the web. I wrote a blog post about this last month, listing the open standards that already exist to cover all Flash's features. http://tola.me.uk/blog/2007/09/21/flash_is_killing_the_web
I guess the steps that would increase SVG's market share would be: the free availability of a plugin for many browsers which supports nearly all of the standard, the availability of a professional quality authoring tool (equivalent to Shockwave), and the adoption of it as a tool for making (annoying) adverts.
Again I agree. In my blog post I provocatively (and perhaps unfairly) aimed my sights at browser developers, but the point is that we need to keep up with actually implementing the open standards or proprietary solutions will get there first. Application developers and designers are pragmatists, they use the best solution available to the greatest number of people and so far that's Flash.
Whether or not increasing SVG's market share is a /good/ thing is another question entirely.
And my answer would be a resounding "yes".
-- Ben Francis http://tola.me.uk