SVG Is The Future Of Application Development | Hacker News Reader

SVG Is The Future Of Application Development

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36 pointsastrec23 comments

I don't follow any line of thinking that presumes widespread adoption of anything on the basis of HTML/CSS/JS being inconvenient or impure. As if that has ever stopped us. Time has shown that the collective energy of a million developers butting their heads up against those limitations is enough to keep things moving forward an inch at a time. The web is a messy and inconsistent place and will undoubtedly remain so for a long time to come.

As for Silverlight and AIR, well, they might taste like pumpkin pie, but I wouldn't know, etc.

( p.s. for anybody using WebKit nightlies: http://webkit.org/blog-files/animation-demo.svg )

Considering the standard has been in development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svg) since 1999 (10 years ??) this is a sad state... the future of app development?

The article thankfully mentions IE exactly once. Microsoft does not officially support SVG, you need a plugin.

Even Chrome does not support the SVG 1.1 standard fully, as per the wikipedia article.

Browsers need a standard, natively supported graphics library sigh...

"Browsers need a standard, natively supported graphics library sigh..."

High performance as well. It's pointless if it only runs smoothly on your high-end Macbook.

The raphael library he writes about looks interesting, it uses vml for internet explorer and svg elsewhere.

I had never heard about vml. According to wikipedia it is used by google maps as a replacement for svg in ie. That surprised me too: svg is actually being used by a very useful site.

I tried using SVG many years ago - but had to give up due to its lack of adoption and support by browsers. What finally killed it for me was Adobe announcing they were dropping development and support for their (aging) SVG viewer.

So I looked around - and turned to Silverlight, which is unusual for me as I normally avoid Microsoft technology on the philosphical principle that it will be closed, proprietary, idiosyncratic, designed for someone with a very strange view of reality and incredibly inconsistent from one version to the next. But - Silverlight is XML - no nasty binary objects in the nackground, - it implements .NET - which is close to a language standard and could easily become one - it looks like the sort of thing that wold not be too hard for other platforms to implement - and Microsoft might out their resources behind making it a wide-support platform - and did I mention that it's pure XML. How cool is that!

SVG is ok, but very awkward to use in applications, and it was designed in a world where the verb 'to gooogle' did not exist.

One context in which I've tested SVG is together with XUL, running on Firefox. The combination is brilliant for complex UI and makes you wish it was more widely supported.

Got a screenshot or something public? I think XUL is interesting and would love to do some app development with it, but I keep coming back to worse is better and HTML is good enough.

I've not got anything I made that I could point you at without a bit of work, although I was originally inspired to try the combination by an article [1] in German magazine c't. Source code for the example from the article is downloadable. [2] It's a simple calendar/timetable app, and they've built the calendar display in SVG, and the rest of the UI in XUL. It uses PHP & MySQL server side and should hopefully make some sense even if you don't know German.

[1] http://www.heise.de/kiosk/archiv/ct/2008/5/202_kiosk

[2] ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/0805-202.zip

I'm still hoping someone will release a solid SVG renderer written in Flash or Flex. There are a few projects that are most of the way there, but it would be really neat to have a feature complete one for SVG Tiny which allowed you to reliably render SVG graphics in IE.

Check out the capabilities of the specification.

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/

It appears I just discovered a valuable, free, resource with untapped potential.

Happy Hacking!

SVG itself has no good implementations. Does SVG mobile?

Writing a specification with awesome capabilities is a lot easier than writing the software.

http://code.google.com/p/svgfig/

I just found this one.

Cheers!

worthwhile comment by jonathansnook: "The problem with the current state of HTML is that it’s elements for interactivity are quite limited without JavaScript. We have a limited set of form elements and then we fall back to the page request/response of old.

This is a problem that SVG does not solve. Sure, it might make certain presentation elements easier to create but that’s more of a CSS issue than an HTML issue.

This is something that HTML5 is trying to address with additional input types. We’ll still need JavaScript though to mimic more common complex desktop interactions like tree structures and tri-state inputs."

A more pressing problem with SVG is that it is like every other W3C standard: bloated, unwieldy, and obfuscated. Not to mention that SVG does not have all the capabilities of PS. PS is a complete turing complete language specialized for drawing vector graphics. SVG is more restricted and certainly slower to work with, not as well supported, and very very verbose.

> [...] and very very verbose

it's possible to write compact SVG. For example, it has a simple and very compact sub-language for specifying paths (with one-letter commands): http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/paths.html#PathDataBNF

What do you mean by 'not as well supported'? SVG is supported by Firefox, Opera and Webkit (Safari / Chrome). I'm not aware of any Browser that supports Postscript.

As for turing complete: SVG is fully scriptable with Javascript, which is turing complete and built-in in every browser.

Some parts of SVG are supported by those browsers; other parts aren't. Generally the implementations are pretty slow and, last I checked, unstable too.

I've tried using it, and at some points it starts to break down. For example, if I want to change just one point on a path, I have to parse through the entire string instead of just setting a property to a value.

Every linux box in existence supports PS, very well. So does every PDF reader. That covers over 80% of all computers. Extending this support could be done through a plugin. Compare this to the fact that IE does not support SVG and PS is a far better standard to work with in terms of vector drawing.

As to the turing completeness of SVG, how efficiently can JS transform vectors in comparison to PS. Not very fast.

Also, nobody wants to draw just paths.

"So does every PDF reader."

I don't think every PDF reader supports PostScript very well. Is that what you meant to say?

Yes, that's true. Did you know SVG 1.2 has sockets? http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/api.html#socket

if you need to support technology that brakes combaticility because you think thats the future and thats what stands between you and your productivity or success you may as well use flash which happens to be available today and cross platform.

I'm looking forward doing more Silverlight + C# than anything else.

Ditto. And in the business world, like it or not, desktop applications are often still a factor. The promise of building Silverlight web pages in C# and being able to reuse them in a WPF desktop application is exciting.

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