Lots More SVG From Google and … Blobs!

Here's a mess of notes from the World Of SVG that you might find exciting (I certainly did!)

Google Spreadsheets Now Uses SVG For Charts

Via the Google Operating System Blog. Big news - looks like Google Docs now supports a charting/graphics in their Spreadsheets documents. And guess what - it uses SVG in cool browsers like Firefox and Opera (VML in Internet Explorer). Kick ass! Now I'll have to see how well they import .XLS files...

Google Preparing an Online Presentation App

It may not be a Powerpoint-killer (yet), but Google bought TonicPoint and is going to integrate it into Google Docs as a Presentation component to its Google Docs online suite. It's pretty cool that it uses SVG to do its bizness too.

With these two bits of news, I would say SVG has officially arrived on the web in a big way (c'mon it's an integral part of Google's "Office Killer" suite of apps).

Dojo Chart Benchmarking

Link to some performance data for Dojo.gfx charting (in SVG and VML). Looks like WebKit is something to look forward to!

Prototype Graphic Framework

Looks like Dojo.gfx has some competition. First Mochikit is cited as a key component behind TonicPoint (see article above) and now a new JS framework for drawing vectors based on the popular Prototype. Competition is nice, but I'd rather see somebody implement some IE-specific JS that will parse an SVG document and turn it into VML (that way I don't have to deal with all these procedural calls to some new API, I can just write my SVG declaratively as it was meant to be).

Blobs

And if you're looking for a cool little distraction - check out Blobular, a neat little SVG demo.