Re: [Fsfe-uk] SVG - ReplaceFlash, was: BBC digital curriculum service in England

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 00:01 +0100, Jim Ley wrote:
> [I just joined the list to comment on this discussion, hope you don't
> me stepping in out of line]

No no no, you're more than welcome. We're mostly friendly ;)

> Both of these (and mozila and KSVG from KDE with
> some effort on the part of the author) are capable of producing the
> sort of scripted animations we've seen in the thread.

Really? I know you've corrected me on some information that has been
lingering in my brain, but I did download a fairly recent SVG build
(although the firefox build looks quite old) and try some SVG - it
really didn't seem to be up to much. I certainly couldn't get anything
to animate; getting things to display was hard enough.

> The biggest problem as has been mentioned in this thread is authoring
> tool support, whilst this is improving (the adoption of SVG as a
> Mobile standard required by vodafone for all their phones has
> increased the market for good tools) they still aren't there - and the
> automatic conversion from flash, whilst vaguely working leads to very
> poor SVG files due to the differing animation models.

I think also, for the purposes we're talking about, SVG would have to be
combined with something else to provide the multimedia support (we've
been talking about SMIL, for example). For example, a number of the
projects I've worked on in the past have required reasonably high
quality audio streaming, which is something else Flash has built in and
that SVG wouldn't (and shouldn't) be looking to replace itself. 

If SVG support is going as well as you suggest, could you point me to
the software I should be using and some examples?

Cheers,

Alex.