Re: Question about Stylable SVG

At 07:23 AM 3/8/00 -0800, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon wrote:
...
>SVG is different from most other W3C specs in that
>it won't be browser-makers that implement the best
>viewers -- it will be graphics companies. These
>graphics companies don't also have access to a ready
>stack of other web-related technologies.

Apu,
I certainly agree with your points about how SVG requires bringing in whole
sets of other technologies in order to implement the entire specification,
which makes implementation a very large task. However, while implementing
SVG is no small task, I'm not sure things are quite as bad as you point
out. Many of the non-graphics technologies required to process SVG are
available, such as off-the-shelf XML parsers.

At this stage, Adobe has succeeded in implementing the vast majority of the
SVG spec both in an static graphics editing tool (Adobe Illustrator), a
dynamic graphics editing tool (Adobe LiveMotion) and in a browser plugin.
Implementing the SVG spec in and of itself was indeed quite a bit of work,
but nothing like than the level of effort needed to implement support for
(for example) the HTML side of the web world. And SVG's re-use of other W3C
technologies has allowed Adobe (as one implementer) to share large amounts
of code across engineering efforts. And I guarantee it will be much easier
for people starting work today as there is more and more off-the-shelf
software that can be deployed, rather than having to write everything from
scratch.

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG Editor 
Adobe Systems Incorporated

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2000 12:45:02 UTC