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Graphics Software Microsoft The Internet

WVG : The New Scalable Vector Graphics 432

Posted by timothy from the actually-its-name-is-homer dept.
jafro_svg writes "While the press has discussed Microsoft's upcoming 'Sparkle' as a potential Flash-killer - the technology arena on which Microsoft's new technology is having the most impact is SVG. SVG (now a W3 standard for 3 yeras) was itself billed as a Flash-killer some years ago, and speculation about how it might be accepted into the mainstream for developers (i.e. incorporated into IE) now seems inevitable -- you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG." Jafro_svg also points out this online SVG tutorial.
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WVG : The New Scalable Vector Graphics More

WVG : The New Scalable Vector Graphics

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  • Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spytap ( 143526 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @12:56AM (#7555065)
    Yes but...people already know Flash, they've gotten years of practice and make lots of money off of it. Despite potentially better technology, will they switch from what is familiar?

    For reference, see Minidisc, laserdisc, Apple, and Linux...

    • Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by UU7 ( 103653 )
      Yes, and people switched to DVD from VHS.

      • Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AntiOrganic ( 650691 )
        This is really an entirely different situation, and you're underexaggerating it by using a deceptive analogy. What was the learning curve required to switch to DVD from VHS? You needed to drive down to Best Buy and pick up a DVD player for $80. Maybe, if you aren't a bright one, you had to take some time to get used to the ability to skip between chapters, pick audio formats or subtitles, or view the special features.

        Manufacturers were eager to jump on and support it because the costs of pressing a DVD are

    • Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by burns210 ( 572621 ) <maburns@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:55AM (#7555431) Homepage Journal
      that is all well and good that Flash is clearly a better system, but does flash come installed on all machines? WVG will, ofcourse. will developers ignore cross platform compatability code in MS-only tech, because it is there? yes.

      Why o why does this company get to do this to the populous? An open standard, taken, broken in compatability, bundled into an already integrated browser in the most widespread desktop OS on the planet, to compete with a company with an existing product...

      I thought MS couldn't leverage their monopoly on the desktop to compete with other technologies... and bundling WVG, to compete with flash, is clearly copetition.

    • Re:Yes but... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      as my boss would say, who cares how much it cost to make all those flash ads... just charge the clients again to redo it in WVG.

      the technology trash cycle is good for business, its called 'planned obsolecense' in the consumer goods industry. beyond that, its just a part of life and software evolution, regardless of who made the standard and to what end.

    • Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by molarmass192 ( 608071 )
      Funny, people said the same thing about WordPerfect, Borland C++, and Lotus 1-2-3. The pathetic truth is that the technology doesn't even need to be better, MS will integrate it into every other one of it's products and it'll be game over for Macromedia. The playing field is littered with the corpses of companys who's lunch Microsoft decided they wanted. It's the risk you take and price you pay for building a software company around Windows.

  • Of course (Score:5, Interesting)

    by panxerox ( 575545 ) * on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @12:56AM (#7555066)
    the real question will be, will it be copyrighted so that only IE / MS can use documents created with it like they are doing with the new word standard.

  • New replacement for flash! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Megor1 ( 621918 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @12:57AM (#7555071) Homepage
    Use CSS and HTML! So many pages out there use flash when its not required (Some people might even say its never required), a bad examples of flash www.shaw.ca, you get to wait as the stupid flash scroll slowly shows you the text in the boxes.

    • Flash has a place (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hungryfrog ( 624114 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:35AM (#7555297)
      "Splash" pages and annoying ads have given Flash a bad name. As a backend programmer who has dabbled with Flash, I think it's a pretty awesome tool when used correctly. You can interact with server-side scripts (e.g. PHP/Perl) and create some very cool tools that react in real time rather than waiting for page loads. It even accepts data input in the form of XML. I think it's a bit of a toss-up on Flash menus. They can be annoying, processor-intensive, and unecessary but they can also replace horribly buggy IE-only DHTML. Part of the problem is that Flash is simple enough that almost anyone can do a hackish implementation, but it really takes some time to understand how really take advantage of the medium.

  • A consideration... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @12:59AM (#7555082) Homepage Journal
    If this technology is cheap or free, that alone would probably be enough to unseat Flash. I know I've been wanting to see this become a standard feature in browsers so that it could be implemented in Web pages quickly and efficiently, rather than slowing down the page load time.

    In most cases, Flash is abused by people who think it adds pizazz to menus or advertisements anyway. 99% of us would get along better without unless we're watching a cartoon or playing a game in it.

    • what? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by octalc0de ( 601035 )
      Where's the incentive in producing this supposedely high-caliber product if only to make it free and/or cheap? It wouldn't be beneficial for any companies involved.

      This being a standard in browsers will be a hard-to-come-by thing. Although it appears to have W3C standards, everybody seems to have their own little ways to distort the standards.

      Plus, vector graphics in flash load fast anyway. Have you ever seen a (well-designed) flash banner slow your page load?

      • Re:what? (Score:2, Offtopic)

        by Mad Marlin ( 96929 )
        Your sig:

        Am I the only one that looks at the number '666' and thinks a+rw?

        Yes, you are. 10% of us are thinking "don't you mean a=rw?" and the other 90% just think you're a dork.

    • Cheap/Free SWF tools exist (Score:4, Informative)

      by hungryfrog ( 624114 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:53AM (#7555409)
      If you want to create SWF (Flash) animations, there are much cheaper alternatives to buying Flash from Macromedia. SWF is an open format, and there are other manufacturers of creation tools. Swish [swishzone.com] is one I've heard a fair bit about. Others are available for Tucows [tucows.com]. You can even create SWF files from within PHP with the MING libraries [php.net]. In short, I don't think SVG will replace SWF simply because of cost.
  • Take a cool semi-new open technology. Make it incompatible with standard implentations. And call it innovation.

    It's heartwarming to see open source beating Microsoft to all the cool new DESKTOP technologies.
    • The sad fact is that a technical solution is worthless without support.

      Mozilla has SVG support for years. Sadly, Mozilla maintainers don't support it and don't put it into the default distribution.

  • Deja Vu.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alan ( 347 ) <arcterex@NOspAm.ufies.org> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:01AM (#7555092) Homepage
    Ok, so Microsoft is coming out with a product that is 90% the same as an existing product from another vender, but 10% optimized for windows only, and probably *just* different enough that it's easy to get in to, but hard to switch back. It'll be included with every copy of windows (when it's released sometime towards the end of the decade).

    Sound familiar to anyone?
    • yup, sounds like the HTML debacle. Anyone for Anti-Toast?
    • Ok, so Microsoft is coming out with a product that is 90% the same as an existing product from another vender, but 10% optimized for windows only, and probably *just* different enough that it's easy to get in to, but hard to switch back. It'll be included with every copy of windows (when it's released sometime towards the end of the decade).

      Good theory, expect Microsoft was one of the original developers involved in the creation of SVG. Oh, how soon everyone forgets...

      "SVG is currently a working draft a

  • Anyone remember MS Java? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aardpig ( 622459 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:02AM (#7555101)

    you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG.

    Funny how Microsoft never manages complete compliance with a standard. How does it go again? Oh yes: embrace, extend, cripple, discard. Repeat ad nauseam.

  • Sparkle history (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:02AM (#7555109)
    Sparkle is a joint venture of Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern.
  • But what about sparkle motion?

    Mr. Sparkle?

  • The real reason this is important... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Umm, people, the reason this is important is because client-side apps will be using this to draw their interfaces. WVG is the new way to do UI in Longhorn, whether it's in the browser or not.

  • Come on, people! Flash-killer? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JeanPaulBob ( 585149 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:05AM (#7555124)

    If Flash really was replaced by WVG, do you know what the result would be? It's simple: Flash would be replaced by WVG. Instead of everyone complaining about the annoying Flash ads and site designs, we'd be complaining about the annoying WVG ads and site designs.

    What's that you say? WVG won't support audio?[1] It won't be interactive like Flash[2], so there won't be any websites made entirely out of WVG? Then what on earth makes you think people will switch from Flash?

    [1] I really have no idea whether WVG will support audio. If it will, my point is even stronger.
    [2] See [1].

  • The last 10% (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:06AM (#7555128)
    you see, Sparkle's real name is WVG and is 90% identical to SVG.

    And Microsoft FrontPage and IE support a version of HTML that is 90% identical to W3C-compliant HTML. It's that last 10% that makes me want to throw my forehead through my monitor every day at the office.

  • Will Sparkle shine (Score:4, Funny)

    by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:07AM (#7555134) Homepage Journal
    the way Chrome [com.com] did? ;-)

  • About time... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kulic ( 122255 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:13AM (#7555167) Homepage
    SVG (now a W3 standard for 3 years) was itself billed as a Flash-killer some years ago

    It's funny how some things turn out. Two years ago I was doing some research for a software company (they made CAD software adapted for ship design with lots of extra features) who wanted to put their product tutorials online and create a feedback system. The idea was that they wouldn't have to spend so much time teaching users how to use their software.

    Anyway, I was looking at designing interactive websites and had to investigate a whole lot of new technologies, SVG among them. I found a few really cool examples, but nothing really useful. I also concluded at that time that it would be too hard to get SVG working in the users' browsers (Netscape 6.0 had just come out - it supposedly supported SVG, but damned if I could get it to work properly). Also, no one else was really using SVG at the time.

    So in the end we went with Flash - not for the site design, but for interactive physics examples that helped the user to understand why different design decisions gave their ships different properties. Now that SVG (or the MS version) is being incorporated in IE, I could see it being useful for these type of things. Of course, there is the little matter of Flash being well understood by developers who've got lots of experience, and the large installed userbase... Will be interesting to see what is being used in another few years.

  • An interesting little race. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:14AM (#7555173) Homepage Journal
    None of this is that surprising. Why re-invent the wheel? Especially when you can repackage the wheel under your own brand name, add some bevels, and shift the axle off center then call it your own.

    What is somewhat interesting is that, at least in this (very early stage) MS is claiming that this is the new basis for all their UI drawing - the often suggested "totally SVG interface" that has been bandied about on Slashdot. And to be fair, things are starting to head that way. GNOME and KDE already do SVG icons etc. So the next question is, how quickly is the FOSS community going to have something like this already implemented, because they seem to have a head start ATM (though no direct push as MS has). And when it is implemented, how similar/compatile will the implementations be...

    We shall see.

    Jedidiah.

  • Damn Microsoft! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Temporal ( 96070 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:15AM (#7555180) Journal
    As usual, Microsoft ignores the standards and does its own thing. Why can't they be standards-compliant for once?

    Wait a minute...

    On a serious note, someone once submitted some art to an open source video game project I run in SVG format. I thought it was pretty neat that I could resize the image without losing visual quality, but I was rather put off by the size. The file just seemed way too big for the data it contained. On a whim, I opened it up in a text editor, and what did I find? DUM DUM DUUUMMMMM.... XML!

    Arg! Why!? What's next, raster images in XML? I can see it now...

    <rasterImage>
    <pixel>
    <color>
    <red type="hexidecimalValue">FF</red>
    <green type="hexidecimalValue">FF</red>
    <blue type="hexidecimalValue">00</red>
    </color>
    </pixe l>
    <pixel>
    <color>
    <red type="hexidecimalValue">FF</red>
    <green type="hexidecimalValue">80</red>
    <blue type="hexidecimalValue">80</red>
    </color>
    </pixe l>
    ...
    </rasterImage>

    Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted. Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.

    • Re:Damn Microsoft! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kurt_cagle ( 410798 )
      SVG IS XML. All of it. Always has been. It's a vector graphics format that's written using XML primitives rather than binary ones, but it's still a vector graphic format. Chances are if the size was too big, it was because either someone embedded all of their font info inside of it, or there were huge number of path directives, but bit for bit SVG files are generally not much bigger than the binary formats they represent (especially if they are gzipped).

    • XML Maybe not bloated... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mughi ( 32874 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:39AM (#7555324)
      On a serious note, someone once submitted some art to an open source video game project I run in SVG format. I thought it was pretty neat that I could resize the image without losing visual quality, but I was rather put off by the size. The file just seemed way too big for the data it contained. On a whim, I opened it up in a text editor, and what did I find? DUM DUM DUUUMMMMM.... XML!

      When I looked into things last spring, I remember experimenting with a several small images (3-30k). I suprisingly found that the SVG versions were just as small as (and usually smaller than) raster versions, and that was without any form of compression on the XML. It all depends on what your specific content.

      • I suprisingly found that the SVG versions were just as small as (and usually smaller than) raster versions, and that was without any form of compression on the XML

        This isn't all that surprising if you think about it. The size of an SVG source file doesn't change as you increase the size of the rendered graphic, but a rasterized image file size increases by the square of its width/height (given the same resolution).

        Put another way, which is more concise, an array of pixels that renders a circle or an e

      • Oh, sure, vector graphics will tend to take less space than raster graphics, depending on the detail level. That's beside the point. It's not debatable that for non-text-based formats, XML will take much, much more space than an equivalent binary format. Those SVG files would all be much smaller than they already are if the format were binary. However, it would then be very difficult to understand the format without a copy of the standard handy. Is that such a big loss? It depends on what the files ar
    • Perhaps you've never saved an image in Gimp to HTML format. Row (<tr>) after row (<tr>) of cells :
      <TD BGCOLOR=#ffffff> &nbsp; </TD>

      Its interesting to save a large image to this format and see what it does to a browser.

    • SVG supports gzip. SVGZ files are efficient because verbose, repititious text compresses well.

      Look at the filesizes in these examples [svgmaker.com]. Betcha can't make PDF files that small.

  • Remember those? W95?/98 had 'web channels' or some such thing. I seem to recall trying them out once (ooh Disney!), and quickly disabling them. (permanently with 98lite. OT- litePC for XP/2000 [litepc.com] is out, remove all sorts of evil from windows)

    I see this as MS being in the back seat on this one. Sort of like PNG for everyone else. Late to the party and you don't get any cake.

  • Why WVG is great. (Score:3, Funny)

    by dj961 ( 660026 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:18AM (#7555201) Journal
    WVG is exactly what the aging IE needs. With out incorporating new features Microsoft will be unable to keep up with their policy of releasing at least 1 brand new critical flaw once a year. Just imagine to power of SVG with 10% more bugs, added complexity, and lest we forget incompatibility with every other browser. WVG shows us that Microsoft can still continue to innovate by stealing other peoples ideas and branding them as their own.

  • Microsoft all ready tried this - VML (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:18AM (#7555203)
    Looking at their overview, this looks a lot like their previous answer to SVG - VML.

    VML tied into directx. They only mention that you cannot mix GDI and Avalon in the same window because WVG is hardware rendered through Avalon. Also sounds like directx.

    The only major change was that in VML it always wanted a namespace defined for it to work - like IE didn't know what to do with a VML file. WVG seems like a different way to display for generic windows applications - not just web.

    Looks like microsoft is innovating by repackaging an older product into a discription language that can be called by a standard win32 app. It would be interesting to see an open source toolkit that does the same thing as WVG, but uses open standards and remains cross platform.

  • Repeat of the same (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anml4ixoye ( 264762 ) * on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:23AM (#7555227) Homepage

    I posted this a long time ago, but somehow it is still relevant:

    The Effects of a W3C SVG Standard

    Positive: Flash plugin will eventually no longer be needed for vector graphics as a key set of vector standards will be integrated with browsers. Ensuring that fonts are on the users system will no longer be an issue. Font embedding can be standardized.

    Negative: Netscape and IE will both bring "enhancements" to the base SVG models. Of course none of those "enhancements" will be present in BOTH browsers. IE will allow for basic SVG 3d shapes, though no applications will currently support the creation of those shapes. IE will also allow for very loose coding to create the SVG shapes. If you accidentally put a single co-ordinate set into your file, IE, instead of telling you that there is a stray point, will assume that you wanted to create a MSN logo and subsequent link to MSN.Com. Microsoft Word will support SVG export, including in the source file a bunch of code that noone has any bloody idea where it came from, what it is supposed to do, or how to get rid of it. Thirteen years later, Microsoft will take over the US Government and we will find out that the "miscellaneous code", has been stealing our personal information for years. Microsoft will call it "A bug". Netscape, on the other hand, encountering a stray co-ordinate pair, will assume that the "clean-coding" standards of the internet development community are going straight to hell in a hand basket and that the world is coming to an end. "That being the case," it will logically decide, "this poor bloke is about to meet his maker and doesn't need to be squandering his last few minutes with his peepers fixed on a computer monitor now does he? Best he be off to the local pub for a pint or two while he still has the chance". Netscape will them proceed to crash your operating system. Netscape will also do wonderful little tricks like incorrectly display circles as parallelograms, Render every font as 16 point Times New Roman, and completely leave out the bottom half of your document for some obscure reason that you will spend 13 weeks trying to track down before you finally come to the conclusion that "There really aren't that many Netscape users out there anyway". AOL will just compress the heck out of everything it encounters and render every SVG image as a Dot.

    Insignificant: Someone somewhere on a UNIX machine will be writing Plain Text news articles about how SVG is the worst threat to web usability since the invention of JPEG compression. They will urge the development community to avoid SVG because compatibility will still not be standard across all computers. They themselves will be ample proof of this fact only because their 28.8k external modems will not facilitate the download of the newest version of Netscape (God forbid a UNIX user should install IE) and even if they could get it installed, their 16mhz 1987 computer wouldn't know how to run it. The general population will promptly ignore these articles as they click yet another accidentally generated MSN logo link, leaving the insecure author to return to Usenet and his IRC client.

    I figured it would only be a matter of time before Microsoft did this. I normally try to stay out of the *bash Microsoft* conversations, but after dealing with all the problems we have with the Microsoft JVM, and then having this on top of it...ugh.

  • Is everyone really missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheNetAvenger ( 624455 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:27AM (#7555254)
    Is everyone really missing the point?

    'Sparkle' is a vector designed drawing engine for APPLICATIONS inside longhorn, it is NOT being billed as a WEB standard.

    'Sparkle' is the transitional replacement of the GDI model of the Windows interface. Moving from a Bitmap model to a true Vector model for the Windows UI.

    It has NOTHING to do with SVG, Flash, or Web standards.

    If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.

    The only reason the 'Sparkle' vector engine of Longhorn is getting buzz in this area is that unlike Quartz, it supports a wide array of animation standards within the vector drawing engine.

    So, yes it functions somewhat like Flash of today, but that DOES NOT mean it is meant to replace Flash. Instead, it should be the new OS UI rendering engine that FLASH itself uses to draw FLASH applets in a browser window. (Get it, it is the vector engine under applications and things like Flash will use to render on screen.)

    The same for SVG, there is no mention that SVG will not be supported in the new IE of Longhorn, in fact, SVG will probably be supported, but be drawn in the UI by the 'Sparkle' Engine.

    This is an application/OS level vector rendering engine with animation, it is not a Web standard, nor does it purport to be.

    Please stop with Microsoft is abandoning standards and trying to take over the world because they are moving their OS UI model from bitmap to vector based. That is all, get over it.

    Everyone thought it was great stop forward in UI rendering models when Apple did this with Quartz, so how is Microsoft evil in developing their own rendering engine as well?

    • So? SVG isn't a "Web Standard" either. It's an image format. The fact W3C are maintaining the standard is irrelavant. KDE (and others?) support SVG internally without having to butcher the standard...

    • Re:Is everyone really missing the point? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LS ( 57954 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @02:11AM (#7555510) Homepage
      'Sparkle' is a vector designed drawing engine for APPLICATIONS inside longhorn, it is NOT being billed as a WEB standard.

      Well, if you actually read anything about Longhorn, you would know that there is no difference between a native app and a web app in Longhorn. IE will support avalon rendering, so if you go to a website that uses MS's proprietary document/app format, you WILL see a Sparkle rendered page.

      Scary...

      • Re:Is everyone really missing the point? (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheNetAvenger ( 624455 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:01AM (#7555694)
        Well, if you actually read anything about Longhorn, you would know that there is no difference between a native app and a web app in Longhorn. IE will support avalon rendering, so if you go to a website that uses MS's proprietary document/app format, you WILL see a Sparkle rendered page.

        Read anything about it, does USING and developing on it count?

        You are right that Web Applications will use also be able to use the rendering engine in Longhorn; however, you still don't get it.

        You are taking about features of the distributed application model that allows web and client side applications to be synonymous to the OS.

        The fact still remains that 'Sparkle' is the rendering engine of Longhorn, just as the GDI of Windows today uses a Bitmap based engine.

        Using your analogy is ridiculous when you consider that Web pages of today are displayed in IE window on a Windows computer rendered as a Bitmap image. This is no different than it being rendered in the future as a vector image in Longhorn.

        Using your messed up analogy you could also say that because the current Windows GDI uses DIB technology to display a Web Page in IE then Microsoft is trying to take over the JPEG and other Bitmap technologies. (Sound ridiculous yet?)

        You are confusing the two concepts, and using that to establish that the Vector engine or Longhorn is designed to be a WEB standard.

        Admittedly there is more to "Sparkle" than just the Vector engine of Longhorn by incorporating the UI in a XML style that is network friendly, but that does not mean it is designed to take over anything that already exists, it is simply just the evolution of display technology in Longhorn.

        If you look hard enough, you will see that "Sparkle" has concepts from other networking GUI models as well, does XWindows ring a bell? Making an open light protocol interface for the Vector engine is a great idea, much better than shoving massive chunks of bitmaps over the network for remote applications.

        - But again, this does not mean it is designed to replace the internet with a Windows only world - Microsoft is NOT that stupid, nor do they have that much control on the internet.

    • The only reason the 'Sparkle' vector engine of Longhorn is getting buzz in this area is that unlike Quartz, it supports a wide array of animation standards within the vector drawing engine.

      I'd say the only reason the speckle engine is getting any buzz is because Microsoft is using the same marketing machine to create buzz for an idea they stole from someone else.

      Speckle isn't anything new, and surely isn't anything worth writing about--except for those who don't understand that it's JASI (just another

      • I'd say the only reason the speckle engine is getting any buzz is because Microsoft is using the same marketing machine to create buzz for an idea they stole from someone else.

        Good theory, but the buzz isn't coming from Microsoft, it is coming from the anti-Microsoft world.

        Other than visiting the Longhorn development sites to prep developers for what is coming in the new OS, Microsoft has said very little about 'Sparkle'.

        Especially considering the complete implementation and design specifications of Spa
    • If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.

      Sure. Because it's PDF-based and PDF is a...wait for it...STANDARD.

      Also Apple's not trying to tie it into the Web as another poster notes elsewhere.

      Now, if Micro$oft were attempting to redo their entire interface in SVG, you'd hear raves about it with a few cautious twitters that they might be subtlely embracing (gack) and extending (ugh
      • Now, if Micro$oft were attempting to redo their entire interface in SVG, you'd hear raves about it with a few cautious twitters that they might be subtlely embracing (gack) and extending (ughn) again, and our backsides might be in danger.

        That would be wonderful in an ideal world, but SVG has MANY limitations that Longhorn WILL support. From animations and effects that SVG cannot handle.

        Sure. Because it's PDF-based and PDF is a...wait for it...STANDARD.

        PDF, Standard? Um... Ok, and who owns this standa
    • It has NOTHING to do with SVG, Flash, or Web standards.

      Is that why Microsoft calls it a "Flash killer"? Is that why it is 90%, but not 100%, identical to SVG?

      Of course it has something to do with SVG, Flash, and web standards.

      If you need to compare it to something, compare it to 'Quartz' - and I don't see people jumping on Apple for replacing SVG or Flash by using the PDF based Quartz engine.

      That's because it doesn't matter what Apple does--they don't have enough marketshare. Furthermore, it would
  • the 'Flash Click to View' plugin for Firebird.
    found here [texturizer.net] (texturizer). Anything Microsoft puts out will hopefully get the same treatment.

  • 90 Percent SVG, huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by PourYourselfSomeTea ( 611000 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:31AM (#7555279)
    That means the other 10% will break down like so...
    • 5% obfuscating the namespace with ties to the .NET Framework
    • 2% smart tags. These will make your WVG document "smart" -- that is, allow MS to rewrite part of your graphics that might offend them. I see penguins looking longingly out of windows in your future, Mr Graphic Designer!
    • 1% "extensions" Like, it would be really cool if you got a new <wvg:clippy> tag that would pop up every time you opened an wvg document in I.E!
    • 1.99% Buzzwords that make WVG sound like a revolutionary B2B 99.999% uptime .NET-aware DRM-enabled, secure techonology solution for "helping you reach your creative potential in today's competitive marketplace." These, of course, will all be patented and made freely available under an obscure license which will confuse early adopters into implementing them, hopefully putting them directly into the Linux kernel and opening up a brand new SCO-like can of legal worms! These will also make WVG documents playable ONLY in Windows Media Player
    • 0.1% Security enhancements. Like ties to VBScript objects that can execute arbitrary code on your box.
  • This looks like Microsoft's traditional embrace-and-extend approach. Well, except they are making even less of a pretense of "extending" it than before--they just mostly pretend SVG doesn't exist.

    The question is: given Microsoft's patent claims on the Microsoft Office XML file formats, will they try to patent the WML formats as well?
  • and is 90% identical to SVG.

    And that's as close as it is ever going to get. It can be the C# of web-pages.

  • I'm guessing WVG = fucked up SVG

  • IE's getting SVG... (Score:5, Informative)

    by rmohr02 ( 208447 ) <mohr.42NO@SPAMosu.edu> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:50AM (#7555387)
    ...so I feel obligated to link to the Mozilla SVG Project [mozilla.org].

  • WVG and other formats (Score:5, Informative)

    by miguel ( 7116 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @01:54AM (#7555418) Homepage
    I wrote my impressions from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference and the new technologies presented there in:

    http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/texts/pdc.htm l

    There is a potential for XAML and WVG to become standards just because of the large deployments of these technologies.

    Miguel.
  • I too fail to see all the repeated comparisons of SVG to Flash. I agree that SVG can and should be used for animation where that's appropriate and makes sense. But one of the best cases to be made for SVG is in the field of mapmaking - 2D vector graphics for scalable, accurate, zoomable topographical maps, that are also clickable for even more detailed views.

    For the past year and a half I've been working in spare time on fleshing out maps of Russia and the former Soviet Union republics, one map for each ob

  • So let me get this straight. Microsoft is taking a standard, modifying it slightly just for the sake of making it incompatible, and then foisting it upon all users and developers who use Windows, invalidating the 'standard'.

    Yeah, I knew there was a reason we came up with the term "Embrace and extend"... Joy. I look forward to the mess this will create.

  • obfuscate open standards (Score:3, Insightful)

    by oohp ( 657224 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:12AM (#7555718) Homepage
    This is what Microsoft does all the time. It takes an open standard and it obfuscates it so that it's esentially 90% the open standard and 10% MS-introduced irrelevant crap to make the format proprietary. Then MS patents their 10% so that people can't really write some filter to convert from one format to another without risking to be sued. This is what Microsoft calls 'innovation'.

  • SVG for defining cursors in CSS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sstidman ( 323182 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @05:44AM (#7556239) Journal

    One interesting use for SVG is the ability to define cursors [w3.org] in CSS level 2 revision 1 [w3.org] documents. You simply set your CSS cursor parameter so that it points to the URI of the SVG file which contains an SVG cursor definition. Although certainly not the most important use for SVG, it is still useful and worth noting. I can imagine that in the future there will be loads of web sites with all kinds of obnoxious cursors.

  • It's not about formats, it's about IDEs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @10:12AM (#7557489)
    Saying that SVG will kill Flash ist like saying Python will kill JBuilder.
    If it weren't for the Flash IDE, Flash would be nowhere. If MS manages to build an IDE of simular ease-of-use to designers and alongside manages to actually implement true OOP in the underlying scripting of the technology, THEN there will be a Flashkiller.
    Until then we'll have to live with this semi-proprietary technology, with the hip looking IDE frontend, the cool flash vector animations and the most crappy scripting object model ever concieved by the human mind. One that triples development time in comparsion to other technologies. Which is why we still hardly see serious webapps developed in Flash. Maybe that's even for the better.
    Let's all just hope that MS fails as well, and that somehting like a OSS JMF IDE pops up to take over the reign of Flash. We'd finally have a client-webapp IDE that runs on Linux. That would be cool, wouldn't it?

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