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

[Jim Ley]

Alex Hudson wrote:

[sorry about being out thread again, it seems my list subscribe failed]
>> 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.

It's very strict on SVG namespaces, something that the other clients
unfortunately aren't this means a lot of the legacy content doesn't
render.  Animation, it doesn't support SMIL animation, it only
supports scripted animation, this is generally the most popular, SMIL
is just a pain on its own (the same as in flash you always turn to
ActionScript)

>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).

ASV integrates audio, and SVG 1.2 includes Video and Audio support,
the ASV 6 preview release includes support for streaming audio and
video, indeed I created a streaming audio SVG over 3 years ago, the
audio quality then was significantly better quality than the adjacent
flash version (since it could use the proper streaming codecs rather
than relying on the flash HTTP incremental downloading.)

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

Something that works in ASV/Batik and Mozilla (although unfortunately
via a different file in mozilla due to mozilla not supporting
text/ecmascript as the script type is foafnaut -
http://jibbering.com/foaf/foafnaut.svg and
http://jibbering.com/foaf/foafnaut.moz.svg  (for mozilla) This is a
visualiser for social networks (in fact any node/arc diagram)

Or browse around http://www.svgx.org/subjects.html  The biggest
problem as I said is the authoring tools, and we're really waiting to
see what the mobile people come up with here, and how the
inkscape/sodipodi attempts at adding animation support comes through.

Cheers.

Jim.