Google urges Web adoption of vector graphics
Some seeds for overhauling Web browser graphics were planted more than a decade ago, and Google believes now is the time for them to bear fruit.
The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.
New Web programming standards are hard to nurture, but they do arrive, said Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference.
"First they're ignored, then they're hyped, then they're written off for dead, then they start getting real work done," Neuberg said.
Bitmap images, such as this part of Wikipedia's logo, don't scale gracefully to different sizes.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
SVG lets this Wikipedia logo be shown as many pixels wide as you'd like.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Vector graphics describe imagery mathematically with lines, curves, shapes, and color values rather than the grid of colored pixels used by bitmapped file formats such as JPEG or GIF widely used on the Web today. Where appropriate, such as with corporate logos but not photographs, vector graphics bring smaller file sizes and better resizing flexibility. That's good for faster downloads and use on varying screen sizes.
For one example, try the SVG version of the Wikipedia logo using the page-zoom tools in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera. It's a big SVG file, but it does scale. Another real-world example: the illustrations in Google Docs use SVG, Neuberg said.
But SVG has yet to catch on widely in Web programming circles, in part because the dominant Web browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, can't handle them. "It's hard to deploy this when you can't use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said.
Google and various allies are working to change that--its Chrome browser along with Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera support SVG--and judging by the arrival of Microsoft as a gold sponsor of the conference, things could be turning around.
Other signs: vector graphics topped the list of desired new features in a Web programmer survey. And that result helped encourage Google to release a preview version of software called SVG Web that brings SVG support to browsers that lack it.
SVG Web can hand off SVG chores to browsers that support the standard. For those that don't, it runs a Flash program to handle rendering, Neuberg said. "It will never match the performance of native support. It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it does help developers and users deploy content," he said.
At the conference, Google plans to show the fruits of work with Wikipedia to use SVG Web. Actual deployment of the technology is still one or two months away, awaiting more testing.
One issue for SVG is that it's been part of the evolutionary dead end of Web programming, XHTML. But that's changing: the HTML5 standard under development right now explicitly makes room for SVG so it'll become a first-class citizen, Neuberg said.
There's another way of doing vector graphics in a browser, a standard called Canvas that's also part of HTML5. Canvas is best suited to drawing a shape on the screen that the computer then forgets about, whereas SVG is better when the shape will be manipulated because the computer keeps track of its elements and attributes, Neuberg said. For comparison, equivalents of the SVG and Canvas approaches both are available in Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.
Realistically, though, the bigger vector competitor today is Adobe's Flash, which is in widespread use already. And just to spice things up, there's Adobe's FXG, an SVG-based format for vector graphics within Flash.
An advantage of vector graphics in Web pages is that because they're constructed from text, search engines can see and index content, Neuberg said. For example, labels in an anatomy diagram, along with conditions and medical procedures, are relevant data that would be indexed--or for that matter translated with a service such as Google Translate.
"SVG, like HTML, can have hyperlinks coming in and going out," Neuberg said. "It's part of the Web. It integrates with other technologies, so it's not trapped in a box."
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
On the other hand, if it had been around, then maybe Adobe's .PDF format wouldn't have taken off as it has.
Microsoft had their own VML and Adobe released a plugin to display SVG graphics in IE at some point (try using it now though, hasn't been updated in years) but MS has taken more or less the same NIH attitude with SVG that it took with PNG.
So it contains excellent SVG support (and CSS3, and a JS engine that's 10X faster than IE8, and...)
Cheers,
- Bill
So the irony to all this is NONE of the major browsers -- including Google's own Chrome -- actually support the full SVG spec.
If a lot of web sites started doing this, you'd see a lot of browser downloading going on, and maybe it would force MS to release another version of MSIE that supports SVG correctly. And, just maybe, we might see a little bit of a dent in MSIEs installed base.
Emails is another future spot for SVG Imagine having vector animated text coded into your email it could make emoticons obsolete and make UTF so yersterday.
How long do they think web developers should support their crappy, out-of-date browsers?
In our business we also have to use IE6 for the exact same reason. Lucky for us I can also use FF (which I do) for our external Internet web site viewing.
Opera has supported inline SVG a little while now. This feature would mean that, for example, with just a few lines of code you could have a gradient background.
Not only this means that its easier for the web designer (like myself) it also means that rather then retrieving a seperate image file from the sever, all the data is there already. On mass (for every icon, button and effect which could be vector) this could make a huge difference to sever response times.
Lots of tiny bits add up you know!
(Its why Google invented ImageBundles for their GWT....speeds page loading up quite a bit).
Another benifit, of course, is the resulting graphics are as sharp and as colourfull as your screen can do.
SVG isnt suitable for everything, but I daresay over half the images on this page could be replaced, for example. Probably3/4.
That is an other indication if you use just MS Software, don't look outside the Box, MS gives you the best experience! MS tunnel vision!
People will stick with IE6 until those Computers not more working!
MS is like still using a carburetor or MS-dos! Don't change if it's still running.
- by Police_States_of_America October 3, 2009 11:41 AM PDT
- allow people upload svg files to picasa, srsly google
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(21 Comments)