Jonathan Watt has written up some authoring guidelines for SVG. All SVG authors should read and obey these rules.
I hope someone gets around to writing a SVG validator that besides doing the regular validation also warns for common interoperability problems. Possibly based on Relaxed (Relax-NG + Schematron). Such a tool would greatly help authors to write SVG files that works in all viewers.
Safari is begining their SVG implementation and they aim for mixed namespace support just like Gecko. I don’t care much for the entire build-a-full-application-in-SVG but rather want a good vector graphics language in browsers. But, now that SVG seems to have become a competitive advantage for the browser makers I truely hope that we at least can get SVG Basic mixed with XHTML support in all modern browsers (except IE of course).
Antoine obviously has been really bored, so bored he even spent time on implementing a SVG renderer on top of WHATWG Canvas spec.
Tor has checked in some of the final missing pieces for fully enabling SVG in Firefox 1.1. First, the special build names has been removed (you know, for example with -svg-gdiplus) and SVG has been enabled (you now longer have to change the svg.enabled property to see SVG). This is very cool! We are now close to finally getting good (albeit not yet perfect) SVG support in the second and third most prevalent browsers out there (I have no hopes for native support in IE). SVG 1.1 (especially mixed in the same document/DOM as (X)HTML) is a powerful tool in the web developers toolbox and this might actually make quite a difference.
Now, how long until Google Maps comes in SVG?
Mozillazine links to an article in Publish, stating that SVG will be in Firefox 1.1 The discussion at Mozillazine seems to confirm this, and the bug for enabling SVG is scheduled for 1.8b2. Finally having SVG, in mixed namespaces, will enable web developers to build sites never seen before.
This, and SVG in Opera, makes for very cool times ahead!
DeveloperWorks has a new article from Elliot Rusty Harold on sXBL, the SVG XML Binding Language. While I don’t agree with the SVG WG to focus on building an application framework for the web (I think there’s enough for them to do on specifying the perfect vector graphics language first) I think it’s great that XBL is finally being standardised. I don’t expect much to happen with sXBL (too SVG specific), but I think that exciting things might occur when XBL 2.0 is published. If ever implemented in browsers it will be very powerful for web developers.
Kevin, the best SVG developer around, has been hired by Xamlon. I did som minor work together with Kev on Xamlon and must say that they have a quite impressive product on their hands. The vector rendering engine that Kev has written is very well written and competent.
Open SVG Viewer is an open source project that is building yet another SVG viewer in Java. Not sure which of the SVG profiles they aim at.
Corel has released version 2.1 of their SVG viewer. New features include:
- CAD-like visualization. The context menu now offers a choice between three settings - accurate, light, or heavy - for the rendering of thin lines. Accurate offers users high geometry precision, the light setting will display all thin lines as faint lines; and finally the heavy setting, renders all thin lines as 1px lines. This feature will improve the visualization of converted files from CAD/CGM applications to SVG.
- Improved Scripting Support: Corel SVG Viewer now provides more support for legacy scripted SVG content. Supporting accessor functions ‘get and set’ so that existing applications created by script writers will continue to run as you include or migrate to Smart Graphics applications. The viewer alos offers support for the ECMAScript Interval and Timeout functions.
- Improved Performance: Users will experience a speed improvement when viewing SVG files with CSV 2.1.
Niklas | 
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09 13th, 2005| 