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

[Adrian Howard]

On Thursday, August 14, 2003, at 05:02  pm, handa at si.umich.edu wrote:

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

There are a lot of people using SVG in the real world. The list of 
implementations on the W3C site gives some pointers 
<http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/SVG-Implementations.htm8>.

> 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 newest version of any W3C work is *always* in the standardisation 
process ;-)

SVG 1.1 has been a W3 recommendation since Jan 03, and a proposed 
recommendation since Nov 02. SVG 1.0 has been a recommendation since 
Sep 01. The standard is quite mature. Implementations less so.

> 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.

I'm not really fussed about the lack of browser support (well in the 
context of this discussion anyway). I would just like it to be a format 
that all diagramming tools could load and save.

Then I don't have to *care* what application somebody is using - just 
like I don't care what bitmap based application they are using to edit 
their TIFFs with. As long as they can load/save SVG we can talk to each 
other.

> 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.

Not true :-)

SVG has supported this since version 1.0 via nested text blocks with 
<tspan>. For example:

     <text x="200" y="150" fill="blue" >
       You are
         <tspan font-weight="bold" fill="red" >not</tspan>
       a banana.
     </text>

See <http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/text.html#TSpanElement> for details.

Adrian