On Monday 01 October 2007 15:35:12 Mark Rogers wrote:
Richard Lewis wrote:
SVG ftw ;-)
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; it doesn't handle any of the rasterized stuff that Flash does. Flash is applied in two main domains: vector graphics for (annoying) adverts and video delivery for (annoying) video sharing sites. SVG would only fit into the former. 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.)
I notice that Adobe are pushing SVG but their own demos don't seem to play with FF's inbuild SVG support, requiring Adobe's free SVG player. So it isn't *that* different....
Unfortunately, although Adobe's implementation was one of the most complete, they are no longer supporting it:
http://www.adobe.com/svg/eol.html
There are various efforts to continue support for SVG though. Including Arthur in Qt 4, Cairo in GTK, KSVG and, as you mentioned, Firefox's SVG built-in which optionally uses Cairo as a renderer.
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. Whether or not increasing SVG's market share is a /good/ thing is another question entirely.
Cheers, Richard