Related to SVG, and its quest for world domination.
<emote> sets a hand-painted blue "rock" next to his keyboard. I'm feeling poetic today.
It seems that every year or so a debate framed by the powers of SVG wanders into our digital mists and creates a crescendo of "awe and quiet whispers" as to the frail underpinnings of DHTML as an Interface Design Model (hereafter referred to as IDM).
Now, I personally don't have any issues with SVG's, in fact if we had a better grasp of Einstein's time-space continuum we would all like to "rewind" and integrate SVG into the very fabric of the browser itself. But, herein lies the problem.
We can't rewind and integrate, and the politics of business have created sufficient barriers to sentence SVG's to a prison built of Plug-In Software Structure (hereafter referred to as PISS).
See, it's not the SVG that's the problem, it's the vehicle it travels in. No right minded developer would use PISS as a IDM because PISS belongs in very specific containers that are "sub" to the IDM of the page as a whole.
Translated, this means that a page must be constructed with an open architecture that allows the broadest array of insert able features (XHTML, XML, PISS).
This is becoming even more important with the explosive growth of pop-up, pop-back, pop-in-your-face advertising that has given birth to a slew of new software products called Pop-Up Killer and Panicware's Pop-Up Stopper. In the future pages will need to be self-contained "events" that self integrate the broadest array of feature sets. So, you see... PISS fits, but in a defined "bucket" within the whole of the IDM.
Now on to the Illusion of Penetration that marketing done well creates. Macromedia cites 98.3% browser penetration with Flash. The following is from Macromedia's site based on a December 2001 market study (this was hidden well and deep for a reason).
Flash Version
US
Canada
Europe
Asia
Try doing Flash to today's standards in Flash version 2 or try selling a client on IE5+ only with it's 86%+ penetration. Won't happen. How has Macromedia so effectively pulled the wool over every ones eyes? You can't even find statistics on Adobes open-source efforts, though I know they exist. Things lie under rugs for reasons.
So, ...
At the end of the day let me use my DHTML IDM to paint the most effective and broadest message using a completely open ended architecture. This allows me to use PISS when I need too and PISS can include Flash, Shockwave, 3D Animators, Quicktime, Realplayer, etc... Try dropping "any" of the latter plug-ins into the first (FLASH) and I think you will have answered the question for yourself.
You can't...
Raymond
As a note, I have the newest Adobe Reader 5 (software package, including distiller) and I had to download the Adobe SVG player when I went to peruse these predicted gems of global interactive domination. _______________________________________________ Dynapi-Dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/dynapi-dev@lists.sourceforge.net/
