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Microsoft pre-released their XAML-in-the-browser tech­no­logy, WPF/e earlier this week. XAML inside.

XAML “smells” like the W3C’s Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics (SVG). DOM-inside-a-DOM, Declar­at­ive anim­a­tion, 2D graph­ics. XAML maybe not SVG, but it cer­tainly tips its hat to SVG.

Adobe today pre-released their XML-in-a-PDF tech­no­logy, Mars, for Acrobat 8. Essen­tially, Mars as a tech­no­logy is presently delivered as plu­gins for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional. You can save an exist­ing ‘bin­ary’ PDF out as a .mars file. These .mars files are like .jar or .war files: mani­fes­ted, struc­tured ZIP files. Look­ing inside a descrip­tion of a page, you have an SVG Tiny 1.2+ (as Adobe state, SVG/FSS0 rep­res­ent­a­tion. The spe­cific­a­tion clearly doc­u­ments that .mars takes the cur­rent concept of PDF, a doc­u­ment format, and extends this as XML.These tech­no­lo­gies do not dir­ectly inter­sect: an XML rep­res­ent­a­tion of SWF rather than PDF would be closer to XAML. Hav­ing cross-platform viewer sup­port for Microsoft’s XPS would be closer to PDF.

I was pre­ma­ture in say­ing SVG was deprec­ated.

Apple finally releases Intel Core 2 Duo ver­sions of the 15 and 17″ Mac­Book Pro. The concept of 200Gb of disk space and 3Gb of RAM is attract­ive, but we’ll have to see … I don’t think Santa is that gen­er­ous. Unless someone wants a 5 month old 15″ Mac­Book Pro.

Myriad of things from Adobe. Apollo gets US$100m of back­ing from Adobe; but still no code to get your hands dirty. Flex Builder 2.0 for MacOS is out. Woot!

DigitalEd­i­tions com­ments from Ryan Stew­art; in fact, Ryan has some excel­lent com­ments on Adobe Apollo too.

How­ever, the biggest announce­ment is a parry to Microsoft’s XPS: Adobe Mars pro­ject. This is a rep­res­ent­a­tion of PDF in XML, but packed in a ZIP con­tainer. This one has been bump­ing around for a while: and it seems the SVG might just be get­ting another run at Adobe.

Just as Adobe starts to head toward the moon in the Apollo, we have another space meta­phor to deal with: Mars. Or mabye it’s just a pen­chant for Roman Gods?

Fit­tingly, Mars is the Roman god of war.

Too much stuff, my brain hurts. Espe­cially as I have some ser­i­ous Javas­cript and Adobe Extend­script revolving in my head.

Tech­nor­ati Tags:
adobe, apple

RIP Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics (SVG).

Deprec­ated equals don’t use it. The momentum in the web-world has slowed to grind­ing halt.

Whilst SVG is a W3C tech­no­logy, not owned by Adobe, the ori­ginal spe­cific­a­tion came from PGML.

Sad, there was much poten­tial for SVG. All it would have taken was Adobe to make a stand­ard pro­gram­ming model and builder applic­a­tion and SVG really could have taken off. SVG is an example of good tech­no­logy becom­ing can­non fod­der, lost in the charge to an enemy: rather than tech­no­logy being used for good.

Today, we have two XML-based model for gen­er­at­ing rich inter­faces: MXML and XAML. One is in the oper­at­ing sys­tem and a part of a down­load, the other requires a bolt-on applic­a­tion in the browser.

SVG pre-dated these tech­no­lo­gies by some years. A stand­ard­ised wid­get lib­rary; exten­sion into 3D and co-operation by large com­pan­ies could have advanced the world of rich, con­nec­ted applications.

Stand­ard file formats invite com­pet­it­ive­ness in soft­ware applic­a­tions. Con­sider open, stand­ard­ised file formats like world-free trade. The most effi­cient and best sur­vive. A dar­winian selec­tion for the best.

Bet­ter luck next time.

SVG Zone has been updated.

What a strange day. Spent the morn­ing doing “sales man­age­ment” stuff (part of my new job) and the after­noon look­ing at SVG, C# and debug­ging SOAP/Webservices style com­mu­nic­a­tion with the Adobe Graph­ics Server.

Cari poin­ted this out: Pho­toshop Cam­era Raw and JPEG2000 plu­gins for Pho­toshop 7.0. These are pur­chaseable down­loads from adobe.com. Cam­era Raw gives you much greater con­trol when load­ing images from Digital Cameras.

For a while there, the world began and ended on Monday Decem­ber 2, 2002. Sorry about that. Cod­ing error my end. Been a lot of that lately on my end. Thanks Mark.

Added sup­port for object embed style ele­ments; these include SVG and SWF ele­ments pulled from the data­base. Need to get code work­ing to read the default size for these ele­ments. I attemp­ted to do this with SWFs, but found munging 5-bits to make an num­ber of sig­ni­fic­ant bits in the twips of width and height a little too much like hard work (read openswf.org to see what I mean!) SVG will be easier; just use an XML parser to read the data out of the stream. If its com­pressed, decompress.

I am not alone on this PHP jour­ney. wes crusher is doing cod­ing, too

D�Oh. NZ Weather SVG & PHP Demo demo now works. I over did the secur­ity bit, but that�s all fixed now.

The SVG Tutorial Files I used for XML Asia Pacific 2001, the Illus­trator Inde­pth and Adobe for Developers ses­sions is now online.

One wag in Can­berra asked “Can you really change the weather in NZ with that thing?” Yeah, right! NZ Weather SVG & PHP Demo

Peter, a developer from Queens­land, sent me some examples of SVG he has cre­ated: Graph from data, user inter­face con­trol.

The short tutorial on SVG intro at Adobe web site. (in the SVG Zone)

The Pacific Area News­pa­per Pub­lisher s Asso­ci­ation Tech­nical Advis­ory Com­mit­tee (PANPA TAG) has recently pub­lished their PAN­PASpecs (PDF Guidelines for News­pa­per Advert­ising Delivery)

I have been spend­ing time with PHP and MySQL — and I am nearly ready to install my own con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for the front page. Crash course in con­fig­ur­ing Server-Side-Includes for Apache as well as a slide side slip into Python.