[Gllug] Off Topic Not a Plug

[Dean]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 03:18:06PM +0100, tet at accucard.com wrote:
>>Anyway SVG and DHTML will do anything Flash can do and it will work
>>an many more browsers.
 
> Actually, I doubt that.

I doubt your doubt ;)

> Flash is actually very versatile, and the web
> needs it, or something similar.

SVG is hopefully going to fill that niche.

> It has a widely published file format,

The published spec on swf files is for the version 3 files. The latest two
versions of the file format have been under wraps. The author of the Flash
Perl stuff had to make a large investment of time to reverse engineer them.

> and alternative implementations are available for those using platforms
> that aren't supported by Macromedia. The only thing it's really lacking
> is accessibility features so that the blind, or those using text only
> browsers aren't left floundering.

Indexing and book-marking fit in nicely here. As SVG is text (XML) you can
index and search on it easily and if you use XSLT you can convert it into a
format like voiceML so that browsers for the blind could read it. Lets see
Flash do that ;)

As for programming its nice that the Flash 5 has a programming language
embedded but SVG can be scripted with any of the major client side
languages and can have a lot more done to it on the server-side since it is
basically XML.
 
> a modern,
> fast 
> JVM,

Is this one of those pick any two? ;)

The only thing holding back SVG is the lack of browser support for it but
is being looked at. Mozilla has a 'bug' raised to include SVG, Windows has
the (now) 2mb adobe plugin and there is also Batik under the Apache
license.

I like SVG. I do pie-charts in it at work :)

	Dean
-- 
Profanity is the one language all programmers understand
   --- Anon

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