Re: SVG and HTML

At 11:30 AM 7/29/99 -0700, Dmitry Beransky wrote:
>[First, I'd like to thank all the people who replied to my previous 
>post.  Your comments were most helpful.]
>
>I've just read Janus Boye's artical "SVG - What's in it for us?" [1].  Am I 
>crazy to think that as soon as we have SVG supported by major browsers and 
>designing tools like Adobe's Illustrator or Macromedia's Flash or Freehand, 
>(X)HTML, and more importantly the concept of structural markup, will slowly 
>wither away?
>
>After all, of all the people currently designing for the Web, how many do 
>actually care about or even understand the principles on which (X)HTML is 
>based.  All they want, is that their pages look the same everywhere.  And 
>that's exactly what SVG will give them.  Is our future, the future of the 
>Web in SVG?
>

They care, in that they recognize the difference in the way their
composition tool reacts and they prefer a UI which is based on good OO
classification in the working form.  They don't 'know,' in that many of
them can't articulate this, but they care.  In terms of how it is realized
in the markup, they are happier if they don't usually have to know anything
about this.  But the combination of the fact that the want to a) reuse
sub-objects and b) apply re-styling systematically across composite
selections means that the tool will be happier if the markup is
well-structured.

Pay close attention to what Geoffrey Fox has to say at the XML Developers'
Conference <http://www.gca.org/conf/xmldev99/>.  

SVG, with its 'group' and 'use' facilities is actually friendlier to page
composition via structured methods than HTML 4.0 is.

SVG will let you replicate a TIFF or view an ontology.  Which way things go
is not determined by SVG, but on the whole, as a structured-documents
defender I like what SVG does to improve the chances for well-structured
composition. 

You seem to be keying off narrative-derived linear structure vs.
illstration-derived planar structure.  The planar design is there and
neither the planar design nor a feasible linear readout is well captured in
the compromise HTML of today.  Better to let the designer thinking graphics
have graphic objects to manipulate and generate structured SVG.  At least
it will reflect what the author is thinking.

Al

Received on Thursday, 29 July 1999 16:11:12 UTC