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Paul Prescod wrote:
> You need to take the long view and consider the long-term evolutionary
> traits of technologies. Flash is dieing but it just doesn't know it yet:
I'll add a few points to yours:
> * Knowledge of the internals of SVG spreads more quickly than that of
> Flash because of the open file format, "view source", the thorough
> documentation and the open source projects around it.
"View source" is of course essential and is what makes it possible for a newbie
SVG-hacker to learn about it in the same way homepagers did it for HTML tricks
ten years ago. However the fact that it's XML means that you can use the entire
XML toolset and production line. Anyone knowing XML already has a knowledge of
the internals of SVG.
> * SVG is making serious inroads into handheld devices. I believe will
> eventually be as standard on newer devices as J2ME, Bluetooth and MMS
> for newer phones.
It's better than that: SVG Tiny is a mandatory component of MMS. Thus, SVG is de
facto at least as widespread as MMS is.
> * Canon is talking about putting SVG directly in printers
From what I heard, it's not just Canon.
I'll also add:
* extensibility: extending SVG in an elegant manner is trivial. If you need
to add behaviour to your objects (say draggability) just load a script library
the internals of which can remain unknown to you, and add the <foo:draggable/>
element (or attribute, or PI...) to whatever graphic object you want and it'll
instantly become draggable. And then, that's only considering SVG 1.0. If you
look at the requirements for SVG 1.2, it looks like it's about to get very much
better. Flash 6 has started to introduce that kind of thing, but it's not up to
par yet.
* generality: SVG is less an XML vocabulary than it is a modern high-quality
graphic toolkit that so happens to have declarative bits with pointy brakets. It
won't be long before you'll have complete windowing toolkits implemented *in*
SVG. Talk about a rich client... with just a little taste it'll look better than
your OS's UI :) Also, the direction things seem to be taking (which ties in with
my point on extensibility) is to simply use SVG as a rendering layer over
semantic XML. That will rock.
And I'll spare you the details on accessibility, i18n, integration with other
XML technologies, just how bad Flash's idea of XML is (not even a complete DOM
Level 1 last time I looked), etc.
--
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
Research Engineer, Expway
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
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