SharpVectors Mentioned On XML.Com

Sean Gerety let me know about this.  It seems that SharpVectors was (barely) mentioned in Paul Prescod’s SVG Open key note speech “SVG: A Sure Bet”, and it was published on XML.com. 

The trend toward this is already obvious. Do you want to view a chess transcript without installing a ChessGML viewer? You can do that with SVG. Do you want to visualize the output of a geospatial analysis program? You can do that with SVG. Do you want to visualize different aspects of the London underground? SVG. Want to generate graphics in C#, tweak them in Python and view them in Java's Swing? SVG.

For those of you that saw or read my “Declarative UI using SVG” presentation at XMLDevCon, you will a lot of similarity between my presentation and Paul Prescod’s, especially the Desktop SVG section:

But those are just the beginning. Virtually everything on your screen is rendered to the operating system graphics infrastructure as a series of vectors. Windows, buttons and menus are just collections of lines, curves and text. The problem is that every operating system GUI uses a different model for drawing these things. Windows uses something called GDI. OS X uses something called Quartz. Recent versions of X-Windows have XRender.


But maybe one day (several years in the future), SVG could be the native display layer of the operating system or even the hardware. Consider the virtues of using a single rendering model all the way from the human-editable markup down to the hardware, across monitors, and printers. Performance would be better. The various layers of rendering code would get simpler. Applications would use the same rendering API on all platforms.


Now, I’m not going to go as far as Paul and say that it will be SVG, but I can definitely see an XML based Vector Graphics language of some sort achieving this goal.

Got that .Net developers.  Time to start learning SVG.  And the best place to start is Kurt Cagle's SVG Programming.  (I'm definitely bias towards this book, since I help Kurt with it).

DonXML

2 Comments

  • I haven't read anything about the Desktop SVG ideas but one thing I wish MS would add to Longhorn is SVG based icons. Bitmap icons really suck in this high-res world - the choice between tiny 32px icons or blocky 48px icons is inadequate. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could declare your icons as any size you wanted?





    MS could actually make the desktop behave like the Mac taskbar thingy - icons could grow as your mouse passes over them or they could do all kinds of other effects. An SVG icon format could also easily have hot and cold states or animation - hover animation or click animation.





    I sure hope MS has already thought of this - I'm not sure who to suggest it to just in case they haven't.




  • - Performance issues?





    - what regarding the fact that Windows UIs are event-driven which, as a consequence, would mandate SVG files to come with script code to handle the events. We wouldn't talk any longer about SVG then, and would fall into the same (proprietary) trap we are these days with HTML and javascript versus standards and IE.





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