Re: SVG on the Desktop

On Tuesday, March 23, 2004, 8:33:52 PM, Christian wrote:


CS> Hi everyone,
CS> I thought I just point people here to my article on the use of SVG in
CS> the desktop. It summarizes the work we have done are and are doing with
CS> utilizing SVG in the Linux/Unix desktop:
CS> http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6460

Thanks, its an interesting article and a nice retrospective. As you
note, it is focused on Linux and Gnome, and gives a very good
description of the development of librsvg and the uptake of SVG on the
Linux desktop.

Might I point out two inaccuracies in the following paragraph?

>> Things where looking rather good and a huge boost to SVG
>> development came a month later W3C released the SVG 1.0
>> specification on 4th September 2001. Projects such as Apache's
>> Java-based Batik renderer and the commercial Adobe SVG
>> plugin/viewer came into being in the months to follow.

Neither of these were released in 'the months to follow' the SVG 1.0
Recommendation of September 2001, but rather, 12 to 18 months before
that in December 2000 (Batik) and February 2000 (ASV) respectively.

Is it possible to correct this article? I would like to link to it from
the W3C SVG page.


The details are below.

Adobe viewer
------------

The Adobe SVG viewer was first demonstrated to the public at "XML
Europe 99" on 28 April 1999.

There was also a demonstration (by me) at the Eighth
International Web conference in Toronto, Canada  11-14 May 1999.
http://wdvl.internet.com/Internet/Future/svg.html

The first public release of the Adobe SVG viewer, without requiring
registration and an NDA, was 15 Feb 2000. The beta of ASV 2 was 10
November 2000 and the beta of ASV3, 31 August 2001.

Batik
-----

Batik was a drawing together of Java SVG developers who had
worked on the IBM, CSIRO, Jackaroo, and ILOG implementations.

The IBM implementation was in fact the first SVG viewer ever, although
it was not released to the public for a while (it was eventually
released, with full source, on alphaworks).

The CSIRO viewer, again in Java with source, was announced by Dean
Jackson on 21 July 1999.

Jackaroo was announced on 3 March 2000 and the first public release
was 30 June 2000. It was later shut down to move all the effort to
Batik.
http://koala.ilog.fr/jackaroo/index.html

Batik was first released on 4 December 2000.

Others
------

The first public SVG viewer with source available was written by
Carmen Delessio and released on 10 May 1999. It was written in Java


Mozilla in SVG was first proposed by Jeremy Lea on 5 June 19999
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=590
although it took a while to get going and the project was restarted on
12 April 2000 as a Mozilla project
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg
with its own logo
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/mozilla-svg-logo.svg
The first code releases were patches posted as attachments to the
Bugzilla bug tracking system ;-)


Sketch, a drawing program for Linux and written in
Python, acquired the ability to import and export  SVG with version
0.62 released on 22 September 1999.


Please see
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/History


-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2004 19:13:59 UTC