The conference is over, and it was a good overview of the state of SVG across many topics: the spec, browser support, JavaScript libraries, IE workarounds and usage in the mobile industry. What I was interested was to see how far is the 1.1 spec implementation in browsers supporting this technology, hacks (SVG Web) to deliver SVG content to IE users and examples of accessibility using SVG.
You can find links to all papers and presentations on the svgopen.org website if you use the Schedule page and click on presentation titles.
The paper I presented, “Rich Media Advertising with SVG and JavaScript“ or “Introducing SVG and HTML5 VIDEO element to the mainstream advertising”, had a good competition from Wikipedia presenting on the other conference track, was well received and few good points were raised by the audience.
Overall, for what I’m interested in, implementing Open Web technologies in advertising, I would say we are still not quite there in terms of browsers implementations and support, but also that is not a reason not to start doing early attempts, start with a bit simpler solutions that could work cross-browser and do preparations for the near future. Not sure how advertising Agencies will adopt something that is not having even alpha versions of tools and software available on the market, but surely we have to start somewhere.
There is no clear and strong signal that any soon IE will have native support for the SVG technology, but I hope it will be a case in near future.
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickymontalvo
This was announced just two weeks before the conference start by @bradneuberg. Microsoft is joining IBM as gold sponsor for the SVG Open 2009 – “SVG coming of ege.”, hosted by Google in Mountain View, California 2-4 October. Wow!, what a nice display of big players supporting the event.
What does this mean? Are we finally going to have SVG support for Internet Explorer, or at least they are thinking about it? Even if they decide to do so, what do you think, how long it will take to have IE8 patch released with native SVG support? If they plan to do this, wait is going to be worth while. We alrady have ways around to render SVG in IE thanks to SVG Web, still in alpha though, getting better and better, but native support is best, right?
Personally, I would really like to see Microsoft going in this direction. It is all surreal to me to be true. But hey, they adopted jQuery as JS Library for the new .Net platform, who knows, maybe this guys are really starting to open up. But, I’m not going to get excited unless I see some real signals this is going to happen. Still very sceptical.
When I mention SVG to a Flash Designer, some of them first look puzzled, and after explained it is “Scalable Vector Graphics, you know, the W3C recommendation tra-la-la…” they say: “Aaaaa… heard of it.”. I mean really, how can such a tech word appeal to old and new generations of designers, people this technology is aimed to? Right?
It is not only about vector graphics any more, but it is about mashing it with scripting, images and video to produce rich media content. It is about technique using group of technologies. SVG will never be practically used as static drawing on the web only, as the web is interactive, not static medium. We need to came up with funky name so when a designer try to impress his mates in the pub about the latest and greatest he is doing, it should really sound funky and cool. It is same as when the buzz-word AJAX appeared to replace “I’m designing Web2.0 apps using xmlHttpRequest.” with “I do AJAX.”
Only thing I know is we need a new name for content produced with SVG involved it in, but to what Something to think about until SVG Open 2009.
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