On Saturday 05 November 2005 09:57 am, you wrote:
This is very interesting. However, playing devil's advocate, I see two serious problems with svg for web pages.
- Complex SVG files are huge. Those node and fill definitions get
massive in a hurry.
This is true. However, because the information is text, it is highly compressible (compression ratios of around 0.2). And that's why svgz is part of the standard. And of course, no one is advocating using SVG all the time; just when it's appropriate (user interfaces, text and clipart).
- Complex SVG files are mega-cpu intensive. Everytime you try to
scroll the page, it shuts down your computer for x seconds to redraw.
This is true inside of an SVG editor and perhaps also in SVG animations. However, on static SVG images in web pages, the SVG is rasterized and then blitted to the scroll buffer for hardware accelerated scrolling (this is true for Firefox, Konqueror and Opera). So there should be no difference once the picture has been rasterized. There might be a problem on really low video memory systems, though. (Like less than 8MB of VRAM.)
But, I definitely do like the concept. I've talked about this before, but try http://www.zeni.net/trf/mgspec/157.php for scaleable graphics. I generate a libraray of jpgs with different scaling for the most common screen resolutions, although the user can plug any "zoom" value that he wishes into the location bar and the server will choose the closest sized image and scale it for you on the fly. Php is your friend.
Yes I think this is very interesting approach. I considered doing it using the Batik [1] server-size SVG rasterizer which can do almost exactly what you suggest but in the end the unresolved printing issue turned me off. But I still think there's some very useful applications for this approach.
[1] http://xml.apache.org/batik/
Yes, these catalog page background images start out as vector but they are mega smaller when scaled and converted to jpg raster.
Yes that's a huge improvement. It would print poorly but its ideal for screen display. This is also how the DejaVu file format works. It obtains huge compression ratios versus PDF but it isn't well suited for printing.
On the other hand, experts have been telling me for years that the whole world will be using broadband by Tuesday.
We're at about 40-50% market saturation in the US aren't we? Maybe not...