1. As you said, Adobe, while being an important supported of SVG, does not equal SVG. There have been some interesting developments over the last year or so around SVG.

I think the main development has been the tremendous success of SVG's mobile subset, SVG Tiny, gaining traction in the mobile industry. Indeed, to this day, save for Samsung (for now), every significant mobile phone manufacturer has released SVG-capable handsets. These handsets allow users to view animated SVG files out-of-the-box, with the SVG viewer burnt inside the phone's firmware. Typically, SVG Tiny is used for the phone's user interface and customization, as well as animated messaging with MMS, etc. I try to keep track of shipping and announced SVG phones, and I counted 49 to this day although I know I miss about 15 other phones that I haven't had time to add to this list (mainly recent models from Motorola and Siemens).

The other significant development for SVG recently has been on the good old desktop computers. So far, SVG was mainly viewable, much like SWF, in a browser plug-in, most likely Adobe's. However, from the beginning, SVG has been designed so that it could be implemented along with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the DOM and other proven web technologies that content developers have been relying upon for years. The result is today that Opera 8 already ships with built-in support for SVG Tiny, while Firefox 1.1 (already available in alpha) will support a significant subset of SVG and the WebCore (the rendering engine behind Safari) folks have announced they just started working on integrating SVG. Basically, all the Internet Explorer alternatives are placing SVG as the latest addition to the set of web technologies they support natively. So far, there has been no confirmation or denial from Microsoft about whether they'll support SVG in IE7 (my guess, unlikely).

Posted at 2:08PM on Jul 12th 2005 by Antoine Quint

2. I just wanted to mention that it's my belief that MM has always planned on slowly incorporating svg features into the flash player as size and speed permits.

This won't happen anytime soon, but I'd say that in maybe 5 years 95% of svg will be rendered by the flash player. Maybe the Adobe takeover will accelerate things a bit as some synergies will become possible, but I'd stick with that prediction (which was a 10 year prediction 5 years ago)

Folk will say it's because of the Adobe takeover and maybe that will help it some, but the real issues are that in order to parse and render svg the player will have to be a bit larger.

The folk at MM are tracking broadband growth all the time and are I think less woried about bandwidth now, but the developers are still very jumpy about the issue so they will continue to add bytes to the player fairly cautiously to appease the fears.

After 8 it will probably be well positioned to do %70 of svg anyway.

So the long term eventual march to svg will certainly continue, it just won't take precedence over practical short term needs and infrastructure.

-Cort

Posted at 5:18PM on Jul 12th 2005 by Cort

3. jd/mm said:

"SVG-Tiny on mobiles is required by law in Europe"

Can you elaborate JD? What do you mean "by law"? From my experience, and I think I know the european mobile market pretty well, SVG Tiny has been required by the market itself, with large enterprises such as Vodafone making it an absolute requirement in their Vodafone live! platform, to mention just one example.

Posted at 6:47PM on Jul 12th 2005 by Antoine Quint

4. Flash and SVG have been compared for years, because they can both describe vector graphics in a web browser, but they're really not that similar, whether in implementation or specification.

In my opinion, SVG's progress may have been damaged by too many advocates' attempts to equate it with the Macromedia Flash Player, which can render curves in either SWF or SVG format. (Those pixel filters pushed into the SVG 1.0 spec may be possible in the next-gen Macromedia Flash Player, which renders pixel-filters by the SVG definition.)

In all of this, the hard part isn't defining how things "should" be, so much as getting such a capability deployed in the world, where you can rely upon it on your audience's desktops or phones.

(SVG-Tiny on mobiles is required by law in Europe, but has little adoption by manufacturers in Asia -- the Macromedia FlashLite 1.x engine for mobile can optionally render SVG-Tiny, but manufacturers haven't found reason to include that rendering code in the limited space on their phones.)

(MXML is a way to describe data-bound interfaces in XML syntax... it's like how French and English both use the Latin alphabet in different ways.)

David, is there any particular way that you'd like to use SVG-full or SVG-Tiny drawing instructions in the future...?

jd/mm

Posted at 9:46PM on Jul 15th 2005 by John Dowdell

5. JD--

I don't have any immediate need for any flavor of SVG. I'm glad to hear from Antoine that SVG does not equal Adobe, but at conferences like SIGGRAPH over the last couple of years (a place where Macromedia has not had much of a presence), Adobe has pushed SVG, if only tacitly, as an alternative to Flash. My post was rather just pondering what will happen to Adobe's investment in the technology as the acquisition goes forward.

Like Antoine, I'd like to hear more about tech requirements in the mobile industry around the world if you have some sources to share!

Posted at 2:50PM on Jul 17th 2005 by David Robinson