Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, November 1, 2002

Native SVG in Mozilla -- Comment()
I have been using OmniWeb as my principal browser, and Mozilla as my secondary choice. The advanced features of Mozilla are making me use it more and more. Today I learned about the native SVG in Mozilla:

The Mozilla SVG implementation is a native SVG implementation. This is as opposed to plug-in SVG viewers such as the Adobe viewer (which is currently the most popular SVG viewer).
Some of the implications of this are:

Mozilla can handle documents that contain SVG, MathML, XHTML, XUL, etc. all mixed together in the same 'compound' document. This is being made possible by using XML namespaces.
Mozilla is 'aware' of the SVG content. It can be accessed through the SVG DOM (which is compatible with the XML DOM) and manipulated by Mozilla's script engine.
Other Mozilla technologies can be used with SVG. XBL coupled with SVG is a particular interesting combination. It can be used to create graphical widgets or extend Mozilla to recognize other specialized languages such as e.g. CML (chemical markup language). There are samples of these kinds of more advanced usage patterns on http://croczilla.com/svg/.

Books on SVG -- Comment()
Selected books on SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), details from Amazon.com:

SVG Essentials (O'Reilly XML)
by J. David Eisenberg
Paperback: 364 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.97 x 8.98 x 5.99
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 0596002238; 1 edition (February 2002)

SVG Programming
by Kurt Cagle, Michael Bierman
Paperback: 624 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.49 x 9.28 x 7.48
Publisher: APress; ISBN: 1590590198; 1st edition (July 12, 2002)

SVG Unleashed
by Chris Lilley, Daniel J. Ayers, Randy George, ch Wenz, Andrew H. Watt
Paperback: 1152 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 2.24 x 9.00 x 7.42
Publisher: Sams; ISBN: 0672324296; 1st edition (September 20, 2002)

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) -- Comment()
I saw today an impresive demo of an SVG-based www application. SVG is an XML-based format for publishing scalable (and scriptable) graphics on the web. On Mac OS X, Mozilla (versio 1.2a) managed to show and print SVG without downloading any additional plug-ins. For IE you probable need to download software from Adobe.

The best feature of the format: you can generate SVG files from your programs, and also post-process and combine SVG files using XML tools. The new versions of FreeHand and Illustrator can edit SVG files. You can also render (with freely available tools) SVG graphics into JPEG, GIF, or PDF files, if you want. But many features (such as zooming, scripting and editability) are then lost. Here and here you find some SVG examples. There is also SVG FAQ. And you can test the SVG rendering of your browser.