Andreas Neumann's comment on SVG--cross platform and future

Hi,

ASV runs on almost all Linux browsers. Often, it requires a manual
install, but it works. But
it did not go through quaility testing at Adobe and there are a few
issues. The biggest
problem is, that HTML to SVG and vice versa communication is broken.
Some feautures
like sound are not existing at all. ASV on Linux is almost useless for
debuggin purposes.
You don't get any error reporting and on some browsers not even alert()
is working. But
there are workarounds like browserEval()

Looking forward and given the fact that Adobe is quiet in SVG lands, i
really recommend
looking at alternatives. Opera9 is already very useable and developing
at a fast pace. The
opera SVG developers are also very responsive when it comes to fixing
bugs. And its truly
multiplatform. The only problems I had with Opera was with some of my
bigger files. It
gets very slow if you have many elements in the DOM (>10000 elements or
so). But
feature wise it is already quit complete. I was able to run complex SVG
applications within
Opera, such as http://www.carto.net/williams/yosemite/

Firefox might also be an option. FF2 will have some minor, but useful
improvements: text
on path, additional DOM methods, such as .getTotalLength(),
.getPointAtLength(), but it is
still missing many features. Expect major improvements in FF3. Nightly
builds of FF3 are
already available for testing. Performance wise I personally had
problems with FF on Linux.
While it worked ok in Windows, it was very slow on Linux, but people
told that this was
due to some problems in my X-Server configuration, so this is probably
possible to fix.
Tim Rowley, the main SVG developer in MozillaSVG at IBM works on Linux,
so I am pretty
sure it should work reasonable if one has the right X-Server settings.

I also expect major SVG improvements in qt and KDE/Konqueror. These
people collaborate
with Apple/Safari. From what I saw in Safari, the implementation was
fast, but significant
features are still missing. I don't know when Safari/Konqueror will be
ready, SVG wise.
Several months, a year?

I strongly recommend looking at ASV alternatives. Adobe was very quiet
around SVG and
the future seems to be native SVG implementations, without the use of
a plugin. If you
write your code such that it works in Apache Batik, Opera, Firefox it
will also work in ASV
and other upcoming conformant SVG viewers/browsers.

Good luck with your project,
Andreas