Hi Kenneth.
Kenneth McDonald:
Since batik/SVG may become very important in a product I'm working on,
I'd like to try to get some idea of both the future of Batik, and more
generally, of what people think are the prospects for SVG. This sort of
question is both open-intended and (unfortunately) contentious, so I
apologize in advance if I seem to be implying any doubts about technical
merits or abilities of products or people, or if this starts any
mini-flame wars. That's not my intention. SVG technology, if it matures
properly and becomes widely adopted, will definitely make my life much
better, and I'd like to get a sense as the the likelihood of that
happening. (Sadly, many good technologies don't succeed, and many bad
ones do.)
Some of my Batik questions are:
1) How active is Batik development, and is it becoming more or less
active as time goes on?
Lately development has been slow. We have three committers on the
project (Thomas, Dieter and myself), and I have been reasonably busy
lately and haven’t been able to work on it much, and I presume that’s
the case with Thomas and Dieter, too. Despite that, I’m still very much
interested in working on new features in the future.
2) How widely used is Batik?
The mailing list is reasonably active, I think, so that’s a good
indication that a fair number of people use it.
3) Do the core developers anticipate continued significant work on
Batik, and is there a rough timeline as to what is intended over the
next few years?
For me, yes. I had planned to finish off various bug fixes to get the
1.7 final release out some time around now, but my uni work has just
slurped up all my time unfortunately. Definitely within the coming
months I will get back to it. We don’t really have a development
roadmap after the 1.7 release. I guess work would focus on two things:
fixing long-standing bugs (such as
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23443,
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31629), and SVG Tiny
1.2 functionality.
What features in particular are you interested in?
I hope it's OK if I ask similar questions about SVG here; it seems like
a group where people would have worthwhile opinions. So here are some
SVG questions:
Sure.
1) Do people see SVG being adopted into mainstream use at all (in
their own companies, or in products they use)? Or is it still basically
being used by programming enthusiasts/researchers, without a significant
commercial/end-user base?
I think that’s a really contentious question, which comes up on the
svg-developers mailing list often. There really seems to be three
distinct markets for SVG, in my mind: static content (using SVG for UI
resources, clipart, diagrams, illustrations), use in the desktop
browser, and use on mobile devices. At least in open source circles,
the static content market is doing reasonably well.
There is also a fair amount of support for SVG on mobile devices, with
modern phones implementing JSR 226 and 287 for SVG functionality.
There is a big risk here though that this market will be lost to Adobe
and Flash. Flash obviously still has a large percentage of the vector
graphics mind share, and Flash is coming to mobile devices.
SVG on desktop browsers is probably the least successful at the moment.
The technology is good, but not all browsers support it, notably IE.
(Firefox has a decent implementation modulo a couple of features such
as animation, and Opera has quite a good implementation.) In the past,
people have relied on Adobe’s SVG viewer plugin for IE, but since that
has been abandoned for a number of years, and there hasn’t been a plugin
with equivalent capability available, it certainly makes SVG in IE less
viable. There are some up-and-coming projects, such as the plugin from
Renesis, but it remains to be seen how this will fare. I really am not
confident that IE will implement SVG any time soon.
2) Is SVG 1.1 (which is I believe what Batik implements, for the
most part) mature, in that it has no glaring deficiencies that make it
difficult to use in real situations? I've only started looking at SVG
again after many years, and SVG 1.0 certainly did have glaring
deficiencies, in particular when it came to handling multiline text
(which is why I abandoned it at the time). It appears 1.1 has fixed
that--are there other serious problem areas that apply to "common case"
uses in 1.1?
SVG 1.1 hasn’t really fixed the text wrapping issue. SVG 1.2, on the
other hand, does. At one point the SVG 1.2 Full draft had a
specification for flowing text into shapes, and Batik has that
implemented (<flowRoot>, etc.). SVG Tiny 1.2 has a different syntax for
text wrapping, <textArea>, which does just wrapping within a rectangle.
SVG Full 1.2 will still have flowing text in arbitrary shapes, but it’s
not clear that the syntax will remain the same as what was in the draft.
What were the other deficiencies you were thinking of?
3) What is the status of integration of SVG into browsers and other
end-use applications? I ask because, from what I can tell, Adobe once
supported SVG in Acrobat (this is just from reading various archived
messages during my SVG research, so please correct me if I'm wrong) and
has announced that it does not plan to do so in the future; it'd be nice
to know this isn't an industry trend.
I suppose I answered that above. The W3C SVG WG will be rechartering
soon, and there’s definitely features to be worked on and young blood in
the group that should help get past the recent stagnation. There have
been brief discussions in the W3C HTML WG about integrating SVG into an
HTML context (as opposed to XHTML), but nothing has come out of it yet.
Yes, SVG is supported in Adobe Reader. It’s also supported in Adobe
Mars, the XML representation of PDF, and Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo),
their Rich Internet Application plugin platform.
Flash is still as popular as always, though.
All in all, I'm actually much more concerned about the future of SVG
than of Batik; if SVG does well, I'm sure Batik will too. As I say, I
haven't been following SVG for a number of years, so I don't know if
it's been a slowly-maturing technology that is poised for more
widespread use, or a promising technology that is simply unable to gain
critical mass. The feedback of more active SVG users is most appreciated.
I guess the relevant question is: what do you want to use Batik for?
--
Cameron McCormack, http://mcc.id.au/
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