Re: View Source

On Mar 19, 2009, at 00:15 , Jeff Schiller wrote:
>> Allow me to put it another way. Would you rather 1) SVG be  
>> *sometimes*
>> produced in a tag-soupish way and see massive adoption; or 2) stay  
>> strictly
>> XML and stagnate at the adoption level it has today (which means  
>> it'll phase
>> out, notably from handsets)?
>
> The way you have phrased this as a simple two option choice, it seems
> you believe that SVG's XML syntax is the only thing holding SVG
> adoption back.

No, again, this is in the context of putting SVG in HTML. The options  
I describe are not about looking back towards what prevented larger  
SVG adoption in the past — there are several factors in that that we  
have or are in the process of overcoming — but looking forwards. I do  
think that being strict with the XML syntax *in an HTML context* is  
counter-productive both to implementation (due to increased  
complexity) and to adoption (due to incoherence with the context).

> Are you supposing that Microsoft will only support SVG-in-HTML if it's
> not XML-based because they have a bias against "XML the technology"?

I can hardly speak for Microsoft, and I'd rather stay as far away from  
kremlinology as I can. That having been said, I think that Microsoft  
is a company that responds, or at least can respond, to a) better  
engineering, and b) users' demands. I therefore believe that making  
SVG more implementable and more adoptable (again, in an HTML context)  
increases its chances with Microsoft. At the very least, it's a shot,  
and it doesn't hurt.

Microsoft has been known to change its mind when need is demonstrated.  
Just contrast their massive clamouring against binary XML from some  
years ago with its integration in WCF and now Silverlight 3. And my  
rather extensive experience with both binary XML and SVG strongly  
indicates that there are many more users of the latter.

> Hard to believe this when Silverlight's declarative component is
> itself an XML dialect.

I'm not sure it's the same category of XML dialect though. I can hand  
author SVG fluently, but my mind reels at the very idea of producing  
XAML with anything other than an IDE. XAML was clearly designed to map  
easily to some internal representation — and in doing so exhibits a  
few interesting tricks — but it is not XML for humans.

> It's also interesting that many other "RIA" technologies out there are
> XML-based (Flex / MXML, OpenLaszlo XUL).

None of those, however, are used inside HTML documents — that's the  
issue that's concerning us here.

> So where is the evidence that HTML-izing the syntax WITHOUT adoption
> by the majority of deployed browsers is the 'silver bullet' to mass
> adoption?

There is no silver bullet, but HTML-ising is on the critical path for  
implementation and adoption. There is no doubt that people want rich  
interactive vector graphics in their browsers, just looking at the  
number of graphics related efforts in JS libraries makes that clear.  
They could use Flash and yet they don't, which indicates that  
Silverlight isn't going to interest them either. They use canvas but  
there are limitations to it for a large number of use cases. So  
there's no doubt that there's demand for SVG, we just need to clear  
the critical path — that's all I'm proposing.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
     Feel like hiring me? Go to http://robineko.com/

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2009 10:38:46 UTC