> "From what I've seen, there aren't any good
competitors for Flash. What
other products for use on the web do
timelines and have multiple layers
for graphics, text, and music?
Does DHTML+SVG really do this?"
Yes.
It can do an awful lot more besides. It hasn't got the years of tool
development behind it that other graphic/multimedia formats have, but it's
catching up fast.
Scalable Vector Graphics is a non-proprietary web standard. It's
becoming well-established, with offerings from Adobe & Corel amongst
others. It has its own MIME type. But most significantly
:
SVG is
XML !!!
You
can use your lovely SAX parser and all your familiar DOM
tricks. You can transform it with XSLT. You can transform to and from it
with XSLT from other XML formats. You can put it in your XML database,
push it out using Cocoon or whatever. You can use stuff from other namespaces.
You can insert some RDF metadata into it or bung it
in a lump of SOAP if you like. Or you can embed it in HTML. It
uses CSS. You can use the programming languages you know & love (or
loath). Produce/consume it server or client side. Being scalable it's perfect
for mobile devices. It's human readable :
<?xml version="1.0"
standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.0//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd">
<svg width="300" height="300">
<rect
x="80" y="53" width="189" height="52"
style="fill:rgb(39,44,231);
stroke:rgb(0,0,128);
stroke-width:1"/>
</svg>
Well I
like it anyway...
Cheers,
Danny.
an
overview at W3C
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
SVG
Wiki
http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/default.asp
