Re: html to svg gateway?

Andrew Wooldridge wrote:

> Creating (perhaps via xsl?) an HTML to SVG converter, which is
> accessible via a cgi mechanism. 

Well I would use servlets rather than CGI, and a program rather than
XSL, but yes.

>  What I mean is this - you go to a
> website in which you type in a url and hit submit. It sends the url
> to the server, the server parses the HTML and then converts that HTML
> to SVG, packages up the images, etc. then sends that back in the
> response.

This would be better done as a proxy. You sey your SVG browser to that
proxy and then browse the web as normal, in other words ordinary URLs
and hyperlinks "just work".

This sort of thing has already been demonstrated by IBM, they called it
a amicrobrowser. This was a while ago and was using PGML at first, then
they ported it to SVG.

>  An even more ambitious server might trace the bitmapped
> images and convert them to sub svg documents.

These are unlikely to be smaller - I tried it. It would be better just
to include lnks to the images in the SVG. Notice that these will still
be rescaled (using bicubic interpolation) when zooming.


> In a sense you would have an SVG - based "browser".
> 
> I'm beginning to see SVG less as just a 2d image tool and more of a
> "scalable page layout" language...

It can be many things.

--
Chris

Received on Tuesday, 17 August 1999 11:36:05 UTC