Email conversation
| From | Erik Stubkjaer |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | Your opinion on SVG |
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| Date | 1 February 2006 22:04 |
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Tarquin,
I like your site and its concise information.
Read your review on Opera A little bit about Opera
<http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/operaStuff/aboutOpera.html>
> there are a few things that Opera cannot do yet: ..
I missed some words on SVG here.
In your email
----
To Laurent
Subject Re: tree
Date 15 June 2005 22:26
Laurent,
> Now I'd like to attach an arrow on each box and let them point to another
> box
ok, that makes it even harder :)
vector lines or vectored arrows are extremely hard to do, since HTML and CSS
do not provide a way to do this (there is SVG or VML, but neither of these
are cross browser, and are unreliable as well).
----
you refer to SVG, but I wonder whether your statement can be corroborated.
Opera supports SVG (Tiny) http://www.opera.com/features/svg/
and Firefox 1.5 supports substantial parts of SVG 1.1
[URL]
see details at [URL]
(And in June 2005 SVG functionality was available with the Adobe plugin to
several browsers)
I have done some scripting to produce SVG stuff for Firefox, and found that
the browser is indeed stable.
I value Opera among others for its media:screen capability, but prefer
Firefox because of its SVG capability.
Best
Erik
| From | Me |
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| To | Erik Stubkjaer |
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| Subject | Re: Your opinion on SVG |
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| Date | 2 February 2006 00:54 |
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Erik,
> Opera supports SVG (Tiny)
Opera 9 supports SVG 1.1 - some parts are still incomplete and being worked
on, but it is nearly up with Firefox (and has a few things that Firefox does
not, such as animations).
[Ed. Opera 9 is now final, with very complete SVG 1.1 'Basic' support]
Opera 9 previews can be found on http://snapshot.opera.com/
> (And in June 2005 SVG functionality was available with the Adobe plugin
> to several browsers)
I do not consider plugins to be cross browser. They rely on users installing
an extra add-on that they may not want to install, or be able to install.
This is not like flash (which is on most installations). Most people do not
have SVG capabilities. And most users will not install it just because you
tell them to. They will just go somewhere else.
Opera and Firefox - while I have a great amount of respect for them, do not
make up a large enough amount of the market. Safari, Konqueror, iCab and of
course IE do not have SVG capabilities, and Adobe will not make up for that
deficit.
To be honest, there is higher support for canvas (Opera 9, Firefox 1.5, and
Safari 1.3 [badly], with a script to make it work in IE using VML;
http://me.eae.net/archive/2005/12/29/canvas-in-ie/ ). If you are using
scripts to create it, you are better off using canvas. Just be careful of
Mozilla's incorrect implementations, such as where drawing an arc clears the
current path, even though it shouldn't (quite a few demos rely on that bug).
I suggest reading the spec if you are trying to use it:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#scs-dynamic
There is of course another limitation of SVG, in that it generally does not
play nice with the rest of the document, especially when rendered using a
plugin. Typically, it gets a background colour, meaning it cannot overlay
other content in the way that VML can.
But if you wish to experiment with canvas or SVG, you can do so. For now,
however, think of them as an added extra for some of your users. Do not rely
on all visitors to actually support them.
Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/
| From | Erik Stubkjaer |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | Re: Your opinion on SVG |
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| Date | 2 February 2006 11:03 |
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Tarquin,
1) Opera: SVG support increased to partial SVG 1.1 basic. (in Beta).
Bookmarked the snapshot site, thanks. So far, I am happy with Firefox.
2) Adobe. Fully agree. Perhaps I am more concerned with potentials than with
options.
3) Canvas. Noticed it some weeks ago, but not . I found
[URL for human readable (but out of date) spec]
The specs are hard reading for me. I am 'application programmer', who want
to use graphics for rendering my domain, cf Topic Maps, etc.
4) SVG and rest of document (XML).
I am not an expert, but here is what I harvested:
> sysrpl [URL]
>
> One thing that should be noted about inline SVG with XHTML is that you are
> required to do the following in order to get the browser to render inline
> SVG:
>
> Include a xml prologue as the first line of your document
> Have the content-type response header set to xml rather than default
> text/html
[Ed. Which will cause IE not to render the page]
>
> Is you fail to do these things, the document will still validate as valid
> xhtml (just like this webpage), but the it will not render the SVG.
which is a comment to
[URL]
Thanks for the exchange
Erik