I try to summarize the most relevant news from the world of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) every month. Here's the digest for May-June 2006.
Opera 9 Released
A huge step forward for SVG in the web browser actually, Opera finally released Version 9 of their acclaimed web browser. Opera 9 includes SVG 1.1 Basic support, which is pretty close to everything I could possibly want in a SVG 1.1 implementation. Opera now has the best SVG implementation out there are the moment, and Firefox has a long ways to catch up in Firefox 3 (due some time next year).
Sam Ruby On SVG
I follow Sam Ruby's blog to get some insight into feed-related and other hot web technologies, so I was happy to see this morning that Sam has given his vote of confidence for SVG as a technology. Sam raises a good point about SVG being a "positive epidemic": We've now got SVG in the desktop (Gnome/KDE), office applications (OpenOffice), web browsers (Opera, Firefox and soon Safari and later IE) and drawing programs (Inkscape). There are enough things out there including forms of SVG support that eventually support will even out and we'll have ubiquitous support everywhere.
SVG Used in Windows Live Local
Evidence that SVG is maturing as a web technology, an update to Windows Live Local at the end of May results in Mozilla-based browsers being served SVG for driving direction paths. As reported here last month. Note that Google Local does not seem to serve SVG yet, though the Google Maps API v2 supports this hidden option which is disabled by default.
SVG Logo Contest
As SVG matures as a technology, the awareness level of SVG will also rise. I posted here about the SVG Logo Contest. If you have some artistic talent, go download a good drawing program that supports SVG (like Inkscape) and try your hand at designing a logo for SVG as a technology. Entries due August 15th, so get sketching...
SVG Roadshow Posted
In my own grassroots effort to raise awareness of SVG, I posted here about starting the SVG Roadshow. We've had some great participation in that thread with lots of interesting demos, games, applications now available for you to check out in compliant browsers.
Inkscape 0.44 Released
Correction: The source for Inkscape 0.44 has been blessed as of June 22nd. We should be seeing a new version of Inkscape executables released in the next day or two (maybe even by the time you're reading this).
Hi,
I work as a developer on the OpenLaszlo project (www.openlaszlo.org). It is a platform for making it easy to write desktop-style windowed apps which run in browsers.
We’ve got a Flash runtime for our platform and are working on a DHTML runtime right now. I have been interested in SVG for a long time, I wrote some early apps in it in 2001-2002. I want to write a SVG native backend for our platform now. We have a fairly simple kernel API which basically just needs to support image and text regions, as well as some keyboard handling, mouse events, and data loading.
I’ve been following your SVG articles for a while.
I’d like to tap your expertise at some point with browser SVG issues, particularly when I get to Internet Exploder compatibility.
Is there an email address I can reach you at to correspond further?
My email is hqm@alum.mit.edu
Thanks,
Henry
Henry,
I’ve been following OpenLaszlo from the sidelines for about a year now and am quite excited about its possibilities. Here’s hoping “Legals” is the breakthrough that web development needs…
Anyway, I’m not sure about a pure SVG backend for Laszlo since SVG is not mature enough… now that a DHTML backend is in the works, I was thinking that several key enhancements to the DHTML backend to include inline SVG might be the way to go (Dojo supports this already apparently).
I’ve sent you an email.
Regards,
Jeff