Re: IBM SVG VIEWER

At 10:17 PM 8/4/99 -0400, JPadams@aol.com wrote:
>I just got the IBM SVG viewer up and running today. 
>
>Included with the viewer were over 60 example files demonstrating a lot of 
>different characteristics of the SVG spec but the one thing that caught me 
>off guard were the great forms examples which basically had no graphics in 
>them but lots of tabular data and formatted text. After seeing those great 
>examples of how SVG could be used to create forms it suddenly occured to me 
>that I may be changing the way I create my html forms in the very near 
>future. I was thinking of SVG only in terms of the graphics I might be able 
>to create and not forms. 
>
>My question to those individuals more familiar with SVG than my 1 day of 
>experience is, once svg browser plugins are available do you think that 
>database front end forms designers will fairly quickly see the light and
move 
>to SVG tags for forms layout?

Certainly SVG will give you great flexibility to do lots of really cool
things.

I just wanted to point out that we have designed SVG to fit into the XHTML
workflow rather than replace it. The basic idea is that you should use
XHTML for those features which are best met with XHTML (e.g., text layout,
word wrapping, tables, forms, etc.), and use SVG for those features which
are best met by it (e.g., vector graphics, zooming, clipping paths, precise
layout, etc.).

In the future, when SVG is built-in to commercial browsers (maybe this will
work as a plugin, also), the background-image property in XHTML will
support SVG graphics since its MIMEtype is image/svg. Thus, you might be
able to have your cake and eat it, too: use HXTML forms, but include an SVG
graphic as the background image for buttons, for example.

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG editor
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Received on Monday, 9 August 1999 14:57:29 UTC