Hi,
Personal opinions etc...
Whilst I really like the idea of an open standard for vector graphics
over the web I don't think SVG is a contender (yet) for the following
reasons:
- The access problems Jason mentions, saying something's
accesible without reference to how many people are able to access it
/right now/ seems odd to me.
- The speed at which reasonably complex shapes can be animated
is painful slow (esp. compared to what you can do with Flash 9 and AS3).
- The real killer for me though is file size; the maps we use
for the election coverage[1] are based on SVG files output from Adobe
Illustrator. An SVG file for the British Isles at the level of detail we
use is around 2 or 3 Mb. The Flash file which we produce from it, at
exactly the same detail level is closer to 100kb.
Oh, I think this is the first time I've posted here, so hello everyone!
Tom
[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2005/flash_map/html/map05.stm
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jason Cartwright
Sent: 16 January 2007 14:53
To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk
Subject: RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in
BBC business report
Hi Jonathan,
** This is all my personal opinion **
But it isn't a tech demo is it? People (other than techies) are expect
to use it - its linked to from the homepage of a large government
website - hence it is inappropriate.
> SVG standards are designed to be accessible
If an average sighted, average motor-skilled person such as myself can't
get it to load then I'd deem it as failing a pretty fundamental
accessiblity test.
> Server-side scripting is notorious for creating accessibility
problems.
This is a massive generalisation. Pretty much every webpage on an
decent-sized website is generated by server-side code. Code doesn't
produce inaccessible websites, developers do.
J
From: Jonathan Chetwynd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 16 January 2007 14:24
To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk
Cc: Jason Cartwright
Subject: Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in
BBC business report
Jason,
surely no tech demo rubbish on backstage ~:"
you might try Opera, the results are instant and the interface
reasonable.
alternatively why not file a bug report?
the ff default small text is already reported by me:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366539
SVG standards are designed to be accessible, the current implementations
aren't perfect.
whereas for instance there still isn't a single javascript dropdown menu
object that's accessible.
I should know, I wrote the W3C accessible client-side scripting
guidelines ~:"
Server-side scripting is notorious for creating accessibility problems.
Jonathan Hassell is the chap to speak to at the BBC
regards
Jonathan Chetwynd
On 16 Jan 2007, at 10:46, Jason Cartwright wrote:
** This is all my personal opinion **
> ONS and BBC reckon the public is ready.
I don't see the BBC saying that. In fact the BBC News article disclaims
itself from the content of the page linked to... "The BBC is not
responsible for the content of external internet sites"
Personally, it looks pretty ridicuous to use SVG here. Well over 50%
(perhaps more than 60% or 70%) of the audience can't view the content -
including me with the latest version of IE7.
Even in FF2 I can't select the text in the textboxes, I can't put the
cursor in the textboxes anywhere other than at each end, its slow, quite
a bit of the text is unreadably small. Its painful.
Give me a Flash version or javascript version, falling back to doing the
processing serverside rather than this tech demo rubbish.
J
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Chetwynd
Sent: 16 January 2007 09:43
To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk
Subject: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC
business report
Quite amazing!
All you backstage groupies can now start using SVG!
as ONS and BBC reckon the public is ready.
copied and edited from svg-developers@yahoogroups.com
This made yesterday's bbc business headlines so you might forgive them
to
not mention SVG but here is another statistics example that works
ASV3, FF, Opera ...
The Office for National Statistics published an interactive
visualisation tool that lets you analyse your personal spending habits
with regard to the Retail Price Index ("inflation"). See more
information at
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pic/
or point your SVG enabled browser directly to
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/PIC/index.html
For feedback:
svg [at] ons.gov.uk
and btw the bbc link is
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6263571.stm
cheers
Jonathan Chetwynd
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