XML.com Article: SVG: A Sure Bet by Paul Prescod

Hi,

  O'Reilly's XML.com site has published Paul Prescod's
SVG Open 2003 keynote write-up titled "SVG: A Sure
Bet".

  Let me quote Paul's Desktop SVG segment:

  What's beyond the Web? It is possible that one day
SVG will take over the average user's entire desktop.
Look around any computer screen. It is full of lines,
arcs, and other vector graphic shapes.

  Icons are vector graphics. As screen resolutions
improve, yesterday's icons always look too small or
too stretched on newer computers. But vector graphics
scale up naturally. Some screen savers are animated
vector graphics. Why not use standard SVG animations
as screen savers?

  But those are just the beginning. Virtually
everything on your screen is rendered to the operating
system graphics infrastructure as a series of vectors.
Windows, buttons and menus are just collections of
lines, curves and text. The problem is that every
operating system GUI uses a different model for
drawing these things. Windows uses something called
GDI. OS X uses something called Quartz. Recent
versions of X-Windows have XRender.

  But maybe one day (several years in the future), SVG
could be the native display layer of the operating
system or even the hardware. Consider the virtues of
using a single rendering model all the way from the
human-editable markup down to the hardware, across
monitors, and printers. Performance would be better.
The various layers of rendering code would get
simpler. Applications would use the same rendering API
on all platforms.

  This last point is probably reason enough for
Microsoft to oppose it. For this reason and others,
the idea of SVG as a native OS or hardware rendering
API is the most speculative of my speculations. It
would require much faster SVG implementations and a
commitment to interoperability from operating system
vendors. Both of these will take time to materialize.

  But skepticism aside, there are some interesting
rumors floating around. The Linux folks are certainly
experimenting with SVG from the desktop all of the way
down into the X-Windows windowing system. Apple used
something very close to SVG for their recently
released presentation software. Once again, this is
further evidence that SVG has the potential to go
places that Flash will not.

  On the Macintosh something called Display PDF
provides a vector display function, but it has not
gained much traction in the Linux world and in fact
has been losing traction on Unix for years. It seems
wise of the Linux world to avoid putting its future in
the hands of a single commercial vendor.

  SVG is an open, patent-free specification understood
by thousands of developers. It is natural that it will
influence the design of lower levels of desktop
operating system infrastructure. Perhaps one day it
will become tightly integrated into the desktop or
hardware itself.   

  Full story @
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/svg-prescod.html
or
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2003/07/16/svg-prescod.html

  - Gerald
 
PS: Paul seems not to be aware that the next version
of Windows, that is, Longhorn, with Betas coming out
this fall will already have a vector graphics engine
at its core that you can script using XML. Evidently,
Microsoft will use its own XML format and not W3C SVG.
For more info check out the XUL News Wire story titled
"Microsoft will ship Longhorn Betas with built-in XUL
motor this fall" @ http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.xul.announce/17


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