Hi Patrick,
Your presentation looked good to me. I think I'll ask all my students to take a
look too as the basic differences between the two are a bit tricky to
understand and I think you nailed it quite well. I found some of the text
examples early in the talk hard to read on my relatively small monitor, but it
didn't matter too much. About 3/4 of the way through the talk I found myself
tempted to disagree with something about animation, but then the urge passed.
Whew!
I think that interactivity with the user may not be SVG's only advantage over
canvas, but sometimes it is just easier to have things in the DOM for purposes
of weaving in and out. Suppose for example that we've drawn a complex scene
with lots of pillars running parallel to a porch (or telephone poles next to
train tracks), and receding into the distance, as if replicated. If Wiley
Coyote is going to be zig-zagging in and out of the pillars as he approaches
the camera, it is far easier to rely on the DOM to manage the stacking order
and occlusions associated with the animation (at least for Mom and Pop
illustrators) than to ask someone to manage all that through JavaScript (or
even fancy libraries of JavaScript). SVG just does so much of our work for us
that it frees us to do design rather than programming -- at least in theory! I
think if Walt Disney had a choice of SVG or Canvas in making Sleeping Beauty,
SVG would have been the choice, even if the audience couldn't interact with the
forest animals!
The developer's predispostion, as you point out, has something to do with how
she will approach problems and a lot of programmers will gravitate naturally
toward Canvas since it is familiar. The mind set associated with SVG is very
"web-like" and, like HTML, declarative. One abandons a lot of the control that
a programmer might wish to have over customized anti-aliasing, kerning, timing
and the like. In the meantime SVG is in sort of a funny area: too much DOM and
programming for the straight artsy types and not enough control for the
hardware lovers.
Thanks for the link!
cheers
David
(PS, I tried installing Windows 7 on the second machine in my office -- too
afraid to try it on my mission critical machine -- just to start using IE9, but
the darn thing wouldn't let me... have you all announced a release date yet for
when it emerges out of beta?)
----- Original Message -----
From: patrickdengler
To: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 8:50 AM
Subject: [svg-developers] SVG vs. Canvas
Hi everyone,
I did a talk on SVG vs. Canvas. I want to grow this talk over the next 6
months. Please feel free to leave me feedback about it (and don't for get to
mark it as like!)
http://player.microsoftpdc.com/Session/6b113af7-ba3e-44ae-bf8c-1f394029cc18
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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