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Nice things with SVG

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Re: Nice things with SVG

#71

Post by imhoguy »

I really miss Macromedia Flash. There wasn't a single tech like Flash and SWF format which flourished with so many indie games and animated movies available without any extra downloads (other than Flash Player). Barier to entry was so low.

Now, take SVG, it has potential to do everything what SWF could. But there is no editor like Flash and scene/object based coding solution like ActionScript. And each browser has own quirks so only simple SVG is guaranteed to be displayed everywhere.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#72

Post by [deleted] »

imhoguy wrote: post #71

I really miss Macromedia Flash. There wasn't a single tech like Flash and SWF format which flourished with so many indie games and animated movies available without any extra downloads (other than Flash Player). Barier to entry was so low. Now, take SVG, it has potential to do everything what SWF could. But there is no editor like Flash and scene/object based coding solution like ActionScript. And each browser has ow…

[deleted]

Re: Nice things with SVG

#73

Post by Springtime »

geokon wrote: post #66
rckt wrote: post #14

SVG feels like a very underexplored and underused territory. You can do so many things with it. It really depends on your imagination. But you’ll possibly need to “hardcore” a lot of stuff, so yeah, depends on the use case as well.

It's a fun format that's easy to generate, but after trying to do complicated things with it.. you kind of understand why. It's underused b/c - Complex graphics render different in different browsers. So you can't rely on it shows up the same (never had the same issue with a PDF for example) - There are quite a few renderers but they typically don't implement large parts of SVG b/c it's too complex.. So you can never…

> There is basically one editor.. Inkscape.

Do you mean in terms of open source vector editors? As there a wide variety of tools with SVG authoring/editing capability, among the most well-known being Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, Affinity Photo/Designer, even some web apps are available that were made for online SVG editing (eg: SVGator).

Inkscape, like some tools such as Affinity's, adds its own XML namespace with custom attributes and values, though for arrows I would expect it to use native `marker` elements.

It's certainly true that with SVG's flexibility and particularly with cross-browser handling differences/bugs it can become its own task to get consistent presentation when doing more complex things with it. Still very fond of the format.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#74

Post by gocsjess »

One nice thing about SVGs is that they can be connected to the dom, you can do css, and easier to debug than canvas. Performance is the only thing holding it back from making declarative code for plotting and mapping charts.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#75

Post by defanor »

SVG feels much like HTML to me, especially when animations are involved: on the first sight it is quite nice and simple, does its job well, can be handled by fairly basic viewers (as well as converters, editors) and generated easily. Then there are even more features with CSS and JS, which also look neat, but then simplicity goes away, along with it goes the wide support of full functionality, and compatibility (due to partial support, unexpected behaviors in different contexts). It still looks like a fine option when animations are needed, but I would rather avoid those in SVG when they are not necessary.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#76

Post by RobotToaster »

Voultapher wrote: post #69

> Unkey's landing page is a nice example. That landing page is a nauseatingly laggy experience on a very powerful M1 Pro laptop. And slow to load, all for some fancy lines? I'd take a product that focuses on substance over style as dev. Don't get me wrong, style is important and I like pretty things, but here it seems the tradeoff is not well done.

Sounds like a problem with apple's implementation? I don't have any problem with firefox on an old 9th gen i5.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#77

Post by perilunar »

eMPee584 wrote: post #68
perilunar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing i'd like to see is an entire site built with SVG and JS without any HTML at all. It's possible but i haven't seen anyone do it yet.

so how can you know it's actually possible?

Browsers will render SVG files. SVG files can link to other SVG files. Just need to configure the server to serve SVG by default — most servers don't but it's an easy config change.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#78

Post by 7952 »

imhoguy wrote: post #71

I really miss Macromedia Flash. There wasn't a single tech like Flash and SWF format which flourished with so many indie games and animated movies available without any extra downloads (other than Flash Player). Barier to entry was so low. Now, take SVG, it has potential to do everything what SWF could. But there is no editor like Flash and scene/object based coding solution like ActionScript. And each browser has ow…

Well it still exists as Adobe Animate which can export to html.

Comparing SVG to Flash seems like an apples to oranges comparison anyway. The format does not have to do everything that Flash did but can rely on the other technologies in the browser.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#79

Post by tannhaeuser »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #3

One fun thing that can be done with SVG files: you can use entities in an inline DTD to define constants to be shared across different places in the file. You can see some great examples of this in the SVGs in David Ellsworth's "Squares in Squares" page [0]. The major browsers have no issues with this, though note that some tools like Inkscape won't parse the DTD nor expand the entities. [0] https://kingbird.myphotos…

You say "entities" but that term is actually the name for SGML/XML's mechanism to define arbitrary syntactic content for reference/reuse with entity references a la &ref, whereas in SVG you can park shapes/paths/whatever under refs, giving those an id attribute value, and then those element in the body SVG content, which is also what the page you linked is using (for each individual SVG ie. there's no sharing of rectangles across the many pictures since these are pulled-in individually via inot their own DOM rather than used as inline SVG).

I wonder why SVG's original designers found it necessary to supply an ad-hoc re-implementation of the entity mechanism. I think it might have to do with how rendering properties can be overridden at the usage site? At least I don't think it was established that browsers ignore entity definitions or basically anything in the document prolog/DOCTYPE considering SVG was part of W3C's push to replace HTML's SGMLish legacy syntax with XHTML/XML.

Re: Nice things with SVG

#80

Post by jefozabuss »

imhoguy wrote: post #71

I really miss Macromedia Flash. There wasn't a single tech like Flash and SWF format which flourished with so many indie games and animated movies available without any extra downloads (other than Flash Player). Barier to entry was so low. Now, take SVG, it has potential to do everything what SWF could. But there is no editor like Flash and scene/object based coding solution like ActionScript. And each browser has ow…

I think web assembly can be comparable, e.g. unity/unreal/godot can compile to the browser pretty easily.

The problem is that each of these apps can be quite bloated and in the tens of MBs range not the usual single digit MB.

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