[Sigia-l] Tool standardization (was about visio or not tovisio)

[handa at si.umich.edu]

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a great technology, but it's still 
too immature for serious use by practioners, IMHO.

For one, the newest version of SVG (1.2) is still in committee, of 
whatever the pending technical standardization process is called. In 
other words, it hasn't been finalized.

The current version of SVG has limited browser support, though you can 
easily download & install an Adobe plug-in that works really well. 
However, the current version doesn't support automaticially wrapping 
text. Duh.

The next version of SVG -- from what I can tell -- won't support "mixed 
text." That is, the same SVG text graphic won't support displaying one 
word at bold, the next word as italics, the next word in green, etc. 
Duh again. 

The lack of mixed text support makes it a difficult technology to use 
when we practioners are used to working with Visio's (and other 
products') support for mixed text. It also makes it difficult to, say, 
mock up a web page using SVG because a single paragraph in a text block 
is likely to at least mix its basic font (e.g., sans-serif, black, 10 
pt) with, say, blue underlined text to represent a link. This need 
alone pushes IAs and the like to more mature proprietary technologies 
like Visio, SmartDraw, OmniGraffle, etc.

If I'm wrong about 1.2's support for mixed text, someone please correct 
me. I *really* hope I'm wrong! Personally, I think that in SVG, the 
text objects should *at least* support the display of valid HTML tags 
(for bold, bullets, etc.).

Some quick SVG-related links:

W3C Working Draft for Version 1.2: 
    http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-SVG12-20030715/

Download the current SVG viewer for your browser:
    http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html

An interesting SVG wiki:
    http://www.svg.org/

SVG holds a *lot* of promise and it's very exciting. I definitely 
recommend downloading it and playing around with it -- it's fun. But I 
think we're still a few years away from something more stable and 
useful for IAs. Especially until W3C can support mixed text styles!

- Anthony Hand

anthony at handaweb.com



> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 12:14:23 +0100
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Tool standardization (was about visio or not
> tovisio)
> Cc: <sigia-l at asis.org>
> To: Listera <listera at rcn.com>
> From: Adrian Howard <adrianh at quietstars.com>
> 
> On Thursday, August 14, 2003, at 12:26  am, Listera wrote:
> 
> > "David Heller" wrote:
> [snip]
> >> This being said, Ziya, I was not advocating for Visio, I was 
> >> advocating for
> >> standardization (well advocating is a bit strong).
> >
> > I understand. And I object to both. As I said elsewhere, I'm all
> for
> > standardizing on open, interoperable file *formats* not tools.
> [snip]
> 
> The sooner everybody can import and export something like SVG the 
> happier I'll be :-)
> 
> Adrian
> 
>