[Web-SIG] Grail resurrection

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 06:26:26PM -0600, Terry Hancock wrote:
> It's also not clear to me that "there can be only one!".  I'm
> not sure the world can't live with more than one presentation
> plugin.  Surely there are enough of us programming in Python,
> that the goal of programming in our preferred language
> is adequate motivation?

The critical factor is content authors, not programmers.  Assuming someone
defined and implemented a Python-based animation/UI plug-in, there's
basically zero chance that anyone would start providing content using it.

> Also, SVG *is still* a new format until people start using it,
> which they aren't doing (much), AFAICT.

There's lots of SVG-supporting software out there: Adobe FrameMaker, Sketch,
Sodipodi, ksvg, Apache's Batik, etc.  (W3C has a list.) At work we use SVG
exclusively for icons, translating to PNG with ksvgtopng. I expect that in a
year or two graphing libraries will soon give up having multiple backends
and just output SVG, leaving PNG/PostScript/PDF production to the SVG
rendered. 

But note that these are all backend applications.  Where this all falls down
is on the browser side.  At my previous job, it would have been *great* to
be able to count on users having SVG support; we could have drawn really
nice diagrams of what their designs looked like.  But no browsers support
SVG by default, and plug-ins are hard to find and install, given the zillion
browser and platform variations.

--amk