Re: SVG - A thought

On Thursday 20 December 2001 07:34, David Woolley wrote:
|   > BTW: What is also quite visible from your list is absence of Microsoft.
|   > What are in fact Microsoft plans concerning SVG?
|   > So far, MS bundles Macromedia Flash plugin with every copy of MS IE,
|   > and this
|
|   I note that they also don't bundle Acrobat and that Adobe is, to me,
|   the apparent prime mover for SVG.  I draw some conclusiions from that.

Necessity to support PDF (Acrobat) is still questionable to me.
PDF is not W3C standard/recommendation, and is based on PostScript which is 
good but aged technology.
I think XML+CSS, plus SVG for vector-based pictures suites needs of modern 
desktop much better than PDF.

Besides, missing PDF/PS support in Windows is not critical at all - as you 
can install GhostScript and it will do all this stuff for you.
To prevent (possible) questions about Linux - GhostScript comes as standard 
with all major Linux distributions, and KDE/QT uses it for printing and 
"printing to PDF" (PDF generation)

My major concern with Microsoft is SVG support. MS supports XML and 
(partially) CSS2, and there are even some CSS3 properties implemented. 
XHTML support is not listed among "available features" of MS IE, but so far 
it works ok.
If MS is kind enough and can add SVG to MS IE - it would be great for 
everyone.
 
|
|   > Without wide availability of SVG plugins (or other form of SVG
|   > support), this wonderful specification/standard will fail (or go to
|   > niche markets)
|
|   This is why I tend to qualify reservations about SVG by "if it becomes
|   widely adopted".   I would go further than plugins and say that unless
|   it is included directly in IE, or, at the very least, a reccommended
|   update in Windows Update, it will not achieve general market penetration.

That's what I was keeping in mind speaking about Microsoft.
I wrote "plugin" but exact packaging of "SVG-enabler" application is not so 
important.
Adobe's plugin for MS IE/Windows is an ActiveX control, if I remeber 
correctly. But it works also with Netscape6 if you copy 3 DLL's manually to 
Netscape's Plugins directory.
Was my second mail (clarification to first one) is again not clear enough?..
Than I probably should switch to Russian ;-)

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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Received on Thursday, 20 December 2001 07:30:59 UTC