Diaries (page 2)

Hello everyone

Im Andres from Uruguay, i am a CEO of my web design company.

Happy to be here

Surprisingly, not many people have heard of the Apache Cocoon server/framework/components. That is really too bad. Things have really tilted at last during the past year or two into the the full bore use of XML in order to get user friendly products to market. Run of the mill applications are easily created using run-of-the-mill techniques. That is what the 1990s were all about. Recreating the 1970s style dumb terminal block mode user interfaces on a decades more advanced screen and keyboard setup added... images, styled fonts, and a mouse. That may sound like heresy, but it is true. However, in the late 1990s - there was a slight course change. It was basically taking place at the W3. They noticed a lot of information was going into web pages, and sadly, a lot of it would never come out again. The reasons were varied but one big problem is that web designers/developers/authors were using HTML more like a paint set than elements of a world wide information system. Google noticed this, and cashed in big by providing a way to search these massively non-structured, come as you are, anything goes web pages. Yahoo got its start, even before Google came on the scene, as the first truly gigantic hand-maintained catalogs of web pages. Fast forward to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. We now have free tools on our desktop that do some pretty magical things, all thanks to XML, which is as easy for computers to understand - as web pages are for ordinary people to understand. Last year, in late 2005, Firefox 1.5 was released. One of the things it introduced was built-in support for displaying SVG graphics. Until Firefox did it, no other major web browser had that SVG image displaying capability built right in. However, Apache Cocoon, another free/opensource software program, has been providing very elegant SVG support on the web server side of the web for about half a decade. Apache has a couple neat components in it that come directly into play when working with SVG. There is an SVG-to-XML Serializer. It takes SVG information and publishes it in an XML format of SVG. Flexible from a software standpoint, but not too pretty to look at from a human standpoint. There are some other SVG serializers that render into well known image file formats. People with legacy browsers that don't support SVG directly yet will be more interested in these, pro tem, than the SVG-to-XML serializer. Here are these other serializers: * SVG-to-JPEG serializer * SVG-to-TIFF serializer - Mac OS X really likes this format, and Group 3 FAX uses it as well * SVG-to-PNG serializer - PNG offers fantastic compression compared to GIF and often JPEG too Someone has already harnessed this XML-driven data management and display power that is built into Cocoon, courtesy of SVG, to produce an interactive data exploration tool. The tool lets the user graphically investigate various statistics about voting errors in the French 2002 election. This same information would be very difficult to digest in dry tables, which is how we would all probably be looking at it if this was 1996 (or 1976 ). However, it the 21st century now, so they used Coocoon to process the information and render it into interactive maps that presented the information as it related to the geography of France. A pretty clever idea, considering the relevancy of geography to voting in the first place.

The other morning I read the article above as I drank my morning coffee. "In the first study of its kind, three experts in the study of written language have described the common characteristics that caused three famous scripts -- ancient Egyptian, Middle Eastern cuneiform and pre-Columbian Mayan -- to disappear. "The study's basic conclusion: Writing systems die when those who use them -- priests or scribes or invaders, for instance -- restrict access to them." This was an article that I might easily have skimmed or passed by all together. But something seemed strangely familiar about these issue to me. ``The sociological and cultural dimension is crucial,'' said Brigham Young University archaeologist Stephen Houston, the study's Maya specialist. ``Successful systems don't have these prohibitions. Once there's this perception that the writing is only for this function or that function, script death is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.'' So what was so compelling? First, SVG is a language. As such, it is interesting to learn how linguists and sociologists think languages work, and what makes them succeed or fail. Second, there is something to be observed about how things are adopted in general from a sociological and cultural perspective. So here are some of the things that this article brought to mind for me. 1. Restricting access to communication technologies diminishes the value of those technologies and results in their ultimate demise. This is really no different than Metcalfe's law, which says that the value of a communications system grows as the square of the number of users of the system and Reed's law, which says that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. Another related argument is Andrew Odlyzko's thesis, Content is Not King that connectivity is more important than content. For me this last article speaks to SVG's inherent ability to bridge diverse data sources such as you commonly find in the GIS world. One way to look at organizations like Open GIS is that they realize that the connectivity of GIS databases often provides more value than any of the separate databases separately. I would include the lack of extensibility as one form of access restriction. 2. Conversely, technologies that permit broad adoption thrive. In the 80's the desktop publishing revolution made technology affordable. This provided a means for inexpensive mass communication previously impossible. In the 90's a different kind of freedom was launched by web technologies including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This grass-roots technology spread because not only were many of the tools inexpensive or free, but they came from a multitude of vendors. When a new, better tool was released, you could move your content into it easily and inexpensively. Needless to say, that also ensured a different kind of freedom, that is, authors could never be held hostage to one vendor. Vendor's now have to compete on the ease of use of their product, quality of their implementation, price, and integration with other solutions, such as photo-imaging, video editing, and so on. I would add that around the time HTML took off, people began to value extensibility as well. The notion that no language could do everything for everyone was gaining acceptance...metadata, namespaces, and the separation of content and presentation began to become important as people shared the frustration of mixing them in early implementations of HTML. 3. The best communication technology by any objective measure, doesn't necessarily win. Rather the ones that provide the widest access do. The article talks about Mayan and Egyptian languages, but we could also look at the infamous beta vs. VHS in our own times. It is widely understood that the betaMax format was objectively better, but because it didn't achieve wide acceptance fast enough, it was overtaken by the VHS format (which is now being overtaken by DVDs and DVRs, but that's another story.) Another factor to the success of any language is how it is used and by whom. If a language is constrained to a select group, that group has greater, if not total control over the evolution of the language. But here's where there are differences between SVG as a language and SVG as a technology. In language, one industry's jargon or vernacular is gibberish to the rest of the world. There is often more value to that industry in keeping the language as a jargon. It provides efficient communication through precision and keeps out those who aren't part of the "in-crowd". In contrast, a language that is primarily processed through technology, such as SVG which is most often not read by humans, but rendered by a user agent such as Adobe's ASV, Corel's SVG Viewer, or Batik. Here, the language specification is also precise and hopefully efficient. However, without significant distribution of compliant viewers, SVG content has little value to Internet users or content developers. Also, SVG viewers are non-trivial to build properly and any differences between viewers or between versions of viewers hurts SVG adoption. So SVG only has value if everyone has access to the specification and the specification is embraced widely and consistently. This is not unique to SVG of course, HTML still suffers from differences in HTML browser behavior. The only differences are that HTML has been around longer and so developers have learned workarounds for coding in the browsers they care about as defined by market share. Also, that has gotten easier, as only Internet Explorer 5.x+ for Windows has any significant market share so that's the de facto standard. But a de facto standard run by a single company is little different than the priests who "protected" the languages described in the article. "``There's discrimination against everyday use, so that while religion may help a script survive, it does not extend its reach,'' said University of Cambridge Xmovies Egyptologist John Baines, who collaborated with Houston and Assyriologist Jerrold Cooper of Johns Hopkins University. ``And when the people'' -- or conquerors -- ``begin to identify the religion and its script as something heretical or dangerous, there's nobody left to protect it.'' When languages are associated with a religion or regime that is no longer in vogue, they die a painful death. Try opening a WordStar file recently? How about Word 1.0? Do they look like they did when you had your CPM machine? When a single company dominates a market and has no need to extend a language beyond it's own immediate needs, languages cease to innovate and therefore don't serve us well either. Moreover, no company can be the best provider in every category of tools, for every field of endevor, forever. Therefore specialized areas like chemestry, manufacturing, engineering, etc. may be held back when their needs are not addressed, or they are addressed by niche technologies which make it difficult, expensive, or even impossible to share their information with people outside their professional cliques such as government regulatory agencies, the general public, and other "downstream" uses of the information they develop. However, when people from all walks of life experience contribute to a language, it becomes a rich, vibrant, enabler for broad communication between individuals, industries, and governments that is unhindered by language, technology, or location. I bet the authors of this liguistic study had no idea they knew so much about SVG.

I wish everyone on SVG.org Happy Easter and a hard working Easter bunny.

Great to read, that the new Safari Browser (version 3.1) has a better support for the web standards like HTML 5 and CSS 3. More important there is also a better handling regarding the svg graphics in img tags. So good news here. Back to work, Joe from Ferienwohnung Ostsee (the Baltic Sea, visit Ostsee Guide for more infos)

I fully agree with you

I see there are quite a few spam comments and also spam entries in the diary. This is to the administrators of Svg, if you need any help in moderation or anything of that sort - i would gladly help you guys out with what you need. Let me know if you guys need any cleaning up or something.. Thanks, - Rushh.

“behind the scenes in the picture” is the english version of what was submitted to livre.nl and slightly edited and published there as “SVG: een cross-platforme veelkunner op de achtergrond”

UPDATE: German version now also available and Polish version in the works.

Hello everyone,

This is Rasesh Tanna from India, i am a CEO of my web design and web solutions firm.

Glad to be on Svg..

Currently looking to hire SVG experts, pls apply with previous work specifics.

Regards, Rasesh.

its my first entry in SVG World.im happy for with you.

I'm finally coming close to finishing SVG chat on my dating website... I though it will be easier but who cares. The most important thing is that it looks good ;) I got so astonished by the power of SVG in this project that I'll use SVG completely for designing my poker website I'm building next... I'll keep you updated

You are encouraged to use

on your SVG related sites.
It was converted out of this animated SVG:

If for some reason your site can't handle those sizes,
here are some alternatives:

SVG is hot, IE8 is not, use the buzz. Some people really do use IE, often forced, but do. ASV slowly sinks, Renesis probably rises soon, Java (as a fallback) is however often already installed.

To benefit from that i wrote something on the Batik mailinglist. The reply was basically: Good for a GSOC project, but who has time to mentor?

Do you?

If you have ever fixed any Mozilla bug before, Firefox bug 215889 will probably only take you minutes to fix. Please do quickly (within days) so it can be part of Firefox3. Make people go "SVG files? huh?, what's that?" and "SVG files! cool!".

If there is no possibility to write comments I think you should disable diary and stories too, because spamming is still possible. My suggestion is to moderate comments.
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