Re: SVG Questions

Andrew,

At 09:44 AM 8/5/99 -0700, you wrote:
>I have a short laundry list of questions about SVG, which would 
>probably be answered if I carefully read the spec:
>
>1) will SVG tools be "requested" to support reading ZIP files natively?

Are you looking to ZIP for compression or packaging?

>2) will there be a streaming spec for SVG? (like Flash)

The conformance criteria say that viewers should support streaming. Adobe's
browser plugin which we are developing supports streaming.

>3) will there be a way to have reusable components (svg+css+ecmascript)?

SVG can embed other SVG, and an SVG document can contain its own <style>
and <script> elements. I believe this combination is one mechanism for
having reusable components.

>4) can SVG have some kind of "native" (read tags of some sort 
>perhaps) for forms? (I want to just be able to designate some area as 
>a "input field" or "button" etc.

No forms in SVG. You could probably fake forms with a bunch of JavaScript,
but that is a task only for the truly heroic.  SVG is meant to be
integrated as a component grammar within XHTML. Also, you'll be able to put
XHTML inside of SVG. 

After XHTML 1.0 gets approved, the HTML working group will focus on how to
modularize XHTML into a set of component grammars, where the forms features
in XHTML will become a module. The goal is to be able to assemble pieces of
various XML grammars (e.g., XHTML and SVG) together to create interesting
feature sets.

>5) how will SVG display "errors" (like only partially loaded, 
>corrupt, parse errors, etc.)

I am not aware of any decision in these areas for SVG. Do you have any
suggestions?

>7) how will SVG work with SMIL?

Once SMIL2 gets approved, you should be able to insert SVG within SMIL2 and
SMIL2 within SVG. I haven't thought much about SMIL1 and SVG. SMIL2 and SVG
should share the same timing model and animation elements. SMIL2 should be
able to use an SVG document as a media type.

>8) is there any way to assign priority to certain components of an 
>SVG file so that they "load" first?

The only way I know of is to put items that you want to load first at the
top of your SVG file.

>9) Is anyone working on a Generator - type server tool to dynamically 
>create SVG files?

One of the beauties of SVG is that you shouldn't need a Generator tool
because SVG is just plain text. You can generate it easily from UNIX shell
scripts or Perl or Java servlets.

>10) is SVG compatible with the new XML fragment interchange? See quote:
>
>>            In the case of many XML documents, it is suboptimal to 
>>have to receive and parse the entire document when only a fragment 
>>of it is desired. If the user
>>            asked to look at chapter 20, one shouldn't need to parse 
>>19 whole chapters before getting to the part of interest. The goal 
>>of this activity is to define a way
>>            to enable processing of small parts of an XML document 
>>without having to process everything up to the part in question. 
>>This can be done regardless of
>>            whether the parts are entities or not, and the parts can 
>>either be viewed immediately or accumulated for later use, assembly, 
>>or other processing.

We are still working on SVG's relationship to XML fragments.

>11) And could perhaps SVG take advantage of the WAP Binary XML Content
Format?
>http://www.w3.org/TR/wbxml/
>would this make for smaller files?

I haven't studied the compression characteristics of WAP. I would be
surprised if it did much better than gzip, which is part of HTTP 1.1.

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG editor
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Received on Monday, 9 August 1999 18:35:32 UTC