Over the last few months Eric Seidel ported KDE’s new DOM architecture “KDOM” as well as their Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation “KSVG2” and render tree library “KCanvas” to WebCore. Safari has now integrated these changes into the WebCore cvs tree to allow the investigation of further integration of SVG support into Safari.
A bit off-topic maybe, but does anyone know the current status of svg in all common browsers?
ie 5.5
ie 6.0
mozilla
Mozilla Firefox has basic rendering now. It’s expected to include a better support with introduction of Cairo as display engine, maybe for 1.1 IIRC.
IE does support SVG rendering with plugins… they are annoying and bloat. Adobe (and Corel IIRC) has the plugins for IE.
Opera does support SVG-lite in latest (or dev?) versions.
SVG is more strong in cell market right now. But hope it get into desktops too (with faster implementations than available right now… maybe hardware acceleration will help in this area.)
Opera supports SVG (SVG-tiny) in the 8.x series (we’re on 8.0.2). The support’s really quite good — better than the Firefox 1.1 alphas, at least.
both IE versions have external Adobe plugins. Mozilla Firefox 1.1 branch has svg enabled I heard.
Adobe will abandon now that they are aquiring Flash with the Macromedia buyout. And Adobe has the only flash plugin that matters for IE. Also notice that Adobe hasn’t updated their SVG plug-in since 2003.
Adobe abandoned their SVG plug-in long ago. SVG lives on in the GNOME and KDE desktops and will flourish as a graphics format in those environments for some time to come. Whether the scripting/event parts of the specification will ever take off is probably down to Mozilla Firefox.
In a bit of surprise, Flash Lite 1.1 for Symbian phones, released by Macromedia to developers before Adobe sucking them, supposedly reads SVG-T… Taking into account that Flash had quite a larger piece of the pie in phones (talking mainly about Japan, since both Flash and SVG-T enabled phones and content are pretty non-existent, as of now, elsewehere), one wonders why Macromedia bothered.
Adobe, though, has not cleared up what will happen with the battles of Flash VS SVG, Flash Lite VS SVG-T, Flash Paper VS PDF… which I think simply means they’ll kill the technologies that currently have the least widespread support. They would be quick to deny such fears, if they intended otherwise.
The rendering speed of Qt 4 on a standard X11 display with XRENDER just blew me away. Vector transformations with 20 fps even on non-accelerated driver. I’m so looking forward to see KSVG rock my desktop.
Does anyone know what Apple is doing to help KDE? It’s starting to seem like Apple just takes and takes and takes. I know they are within the rules of the license, and are doing nothing wrong, but if you look at some other smaller companies that get a lot from KDE those smaller companies do more to help out. For example when SuSE was SuSE nearly every conference was in part sponsored by them, another example is Linspire sponsoring KDE-Look.org.
I guess it just feels that Apple ought to give something back to the KDE project if for no other reason then to keep the free code rolling in.
Quote:
“Does anyone know what Apple is doing to help KDE?”
Well, as far as I know, Apple developers help creating the new ksvg.
I think it’s the other way around. A KDE technology has been ported to Apple’s Safari.
If you consider DENG a player in SVG, then everyone with flash installed can render SVG.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dengmx/
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Does anyone know if there is a way to operate KSVG via the commandline to produce pngs from svgs? I have written a tool to do comparisons of the different svg renderers (inkscape, cairo, rsvg, batik) so would love to include ksvg in the test.
bryce at bryceharrington dot com
nvermind, found it: ksvgtopng
You know I’d just typed ksv and pressed tab in a konsole window and got:
$ksvgtopng
Usage : ksvgtopng width height svgfilename outputfilename
Please use full path name for svgfilename
Sometimes trying the most obvious solution works.
Looking forward to the seeing the results of your tests.
Please note that the ksvg installed as part of the kdegraphics package is not the ksvg2 they are talking about here: ksvg2 is much more advanced. So if you want to perform tests, compile the kdenonbeta/ksvg2 module. See more info at svg.kde.org .
“talking mainly about Japan, since both Flash and SVG-T
enabled phones and content are pretty non-existent, as of now,
elsewehere”
You are correct on content but certainly not on phones. There are millions of phones in Europe that support SVGT. If you have a phone purchased in the last 12 months it probably supports SVGT. The most dominate player is from Ikivo: http://www.ikivo.com
Well, I confess I made that affirmation bluntly without no real knowledge. It just strikes me, since my N-Gage (non-QD) is supposed to be a future-gen mobile on steroids to most of my acquaintances. Their phones, if they have a color display (about 50%) have quite a duller and smaller screen that makes me love B&W so much, that I doubted they could display something more sophisticated than a string of letters and numbers (hideous background image that decreases readability aside). Of course, most of my acquaintances would not spend more than 60€ in a phone even if drunk… (my N-Gage costed 100€ when you could hardly find one in Spain anymore, in a store that made an agressive offer to get rid of their stock, to make space for the QD)
So, what price bracket are you referring to?