JD on EP

Corel SmartGraphics hit 1.0 release today. I saw their FAQ earlier today (can't reach it now... their servers are on-and-off), and it had the good story about separating presentation and content. I'm not sure of their free plugin's download size (starts with a 225K installer shim)... they've got an authoring tool which does static data-binding to UI elements (cool!), and then their server component apparently melds data and delivers a static file, similar to what Macromedia Generator used to do. The type of SVG they render isn't defined in the W3C SVG Conformance Suite yet, but you can get an idea of which features to use through Corel's Viewer tech docs.

The W3C has released a Working Draft for SVG 1.2, and it has tons of interesting feature proposals, ranging from the use of arbitrary XML data at runtime to construct graphics, to printing, to streaming and progressive rendering, to multiple screens ("pages")... even a video codec! They also make good mention of web services and constructing interfaces. After Working Draft stage, it next moves to Candidate Recommendation, then the actual Recommendation stage, and after people start making proprietary plugins to render all this, and then they can start on the hard work of getting that (those?) plugins into widespread distribution.

All of this has been done by the Macromedia Flash Player for quite awhile, of course, but it's still great to read an alternate take on similar feature proposals. If anything grabs you in that document then I'd be interested in hearing here, and the Flash development team always appreciates direct feature requests too. But check out the SVG 1.2 Working Draft feature proposals... if you're interested in this stuff, it's good reading.

The Amaya browser is a useful tool to have in your toolchest, because it handles documents according to the W3C's specifications. It's also a read/write browser, true to the original aim of the collaborative web. In the 8.0 distribution, released today, "Amaya supports also a subset of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, namely basic shapes, text, images, and foreignObject (the latter is useful to include HTML fragments or MathML expressions in drawings)." This functionality seems similar to what you can get from SVG-in-Flash, through work like that from Helen Triolo or Claus Wahlers, but I haven't compared feature-by-feature to see which comes closer to the W3C's ideal SVG behavior. Anyway, this is the first browser which enables at least some SVG rendering in its default configuration.

People often compare SVG to SWF... although inaccurate, it's understandable because analogies make things easier to initially comprehend... it's like how the term "horseless carriage" helped in getting across the idea of the automobile. I'm convinced that an XML format for describing vector graphics is a good ability to have, even though most of the "SVG vs SWF" arguments I see seem a little weird and blinkered to me.

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