re: Great Intro To SVG Article

Steven Livingstone commented (sorry not a blog entry):

Excuse my ignorance, but why on earth is Nestscape NOT supporting this right now?? Kurt's articles are *always* very good, but let's help him out!

I tried IE, Netscape and then Mosaic which game me a cool "http://www.macromedia.com/error/not_found.html" error. Yeah, coz that will help uptake.

Don is right, but let's force the issue!! Intro to SVG, but let's create a basic site using it?

There are quite a few SVG enhanced sites out there (www.battlebots.com being one of the first), but not many ASP.Net ones that I know of.  THE place for programmers who use SVG is the SVG-Developers board.  But SVG can be used for far more than just in a web page.  I’ve developed apps that use it to dynamically create graphics from SVG templates (created via Adobe Illustrator), and then rendered to various outputs (different raster types, printers, PictureWindow).  So even though it may look like a web only tool, it can be used in a lot of different ways.

But the big future of SVG is as a UI tool, especially as the UI for the OS.  There have been rumors that MS is looking towards a vector graphics based UI for a future OS (but lets remember that rumors are just that, rumors, and not go overboard on speculation).  IMHO, this is where we are headed, a multiple namespace rendering engine that contains namespaces similar to XHTML, SVG, SMIL, XLINK, etc. all rendered in something like a XML browser.  It seems like the logical progression of the idea of a web based OS, with just a XML browser as the user interface.  If you get a chance check out the XSmiles project, which is building an XML Browser with some of the features I mentioned in this blog, but not nearly useful as an UI for an OS.  But playing with this experimental software has given me some very cool ideas of the possible future of the web.

Don XML