xml-dev - In praise of SVG

[Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>]

I'd like to publicly congratulate those involved in the development of SVG
and its implementations. I have been working with computer graphics for
over 25 years and split an immense amount of blood on the floor at
midnight. With SVG I can now do almost anything I want [except for 3D - in
which I also have a molecular interest]. And I suspect that I can stick
with it for the foreseeable future.

In the distant past when XML-DEV was worrying about whether XML was going
to succeed there was talk of needing a "killer app". I (think) I said that
SVG was going to be that killer app. It certainly was the single most
important thing that would show Jane Webpage and Joe Hacker that XML was
more than HTML. We even had a thread "XML *should* be boring" - on the
lines that XML was primarily a syntax for doing worthy things server-side.
And a lot of XML devotees were proposing that XML's role was primarily to
support middleware and that XML-over-the-wire had little role. But the
slogan "save 30% of middleware costs with XML", though probably true, does
not excite most of the people I interact with.

XML-O-T-W has really come to pass with SVG. It has an immediate WOW!
impact. Even for me - who was expecting it - it makes me go WOW! And it
will do wonders for those others who wish to develop technical information
objects over the wire. It is a wonderful collaborator with CML. Much
chemistry is graphical and we have the same dichotomy as MathML between
presentational and semantic chemistry. Only where maths has to use its own
language, we can use SVG for the presentational chemistry. I am
particularly appreciative that SVG has been designed to allow roundtripping
- i.e. conversion to graphics need have no information loss. I'm excited
about access to the DOM - I need to see how I can merge a ChemDOM into and
SVG DOM - and I'd be delighted to meet those at XTech2000 who can help.

Henry, I, and the CML-DEV irregulars have been hacking a few examples of
chemistry in SVG. Early days. But we would be delighted to share these as
OpenData with anyone who has SVG - or XML - tools that they want demo
material for. Chemistry is fun, appeals to many people, and has a
substantial informatics industry, who need SVG/CML. I'll have demo stuff at
XTech2000. All we ask is that our authorship is retained. [help with tools
would be appreciated!]

Finally I;d like to pay tribute to the W3C process in the case of SVG. I
agree that the W3C process leaves things to be desired [I am moderatorially
neutral] , but I think that SVG should be counted a considerable success.
When the activity started there were several submissions and I was worried
that either they would go nowhere or that there would be fissions. In
practice the members have produced a high-quality spec, with very exciting
early proof-of-concept from several members (and non-members). We can
reasonably see SVG being transparently incorporated into the browsers and
becoming part of web life. At that stage many of the Web folk will have to
learn XML to be able to use SVG to its full extent. 

	P.




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