The WWW community is preparing a new standard, Scalable Vector Graphics,
that will permit creating web pages with images defined as vectors,
rasters, or a combination of the two. The new capability allows a user to
pan and zoom within the image, and it will offer an extensive animation
capability. Although the standard is not completely worked out, Adobe has
implemented much of it as a plug-in for Microsoft IE and Netscape.
Information about Adobe's work in SVG is available at the URL:
http://www.adobe.com/svg/
A week or so ago Franz-Josef Behr offered an example that uses the new
capability. His work is at the URL:
http://www.gis-news.de/svg/samples/karlsruhe/index.htm
Yesterday the WWW standards people issued a news release announcing the
start of the formal review of the proposed standard. Their announcement is
at the URL:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-news/2000JulSep/0000.html
I have put together some simple examples to show how SVG and Java work
together. My examples, which are drawn mainly from an Adobe tutorial, are
at the URL:
http://home.earthlink.net/~edwardsrg/Adobe/AdobeTutorial.html
Note that my examples only work with Microsoft IE (because of an temporary
EarthLink limitation), and remember that you have to load the Adobe plug-in
to generate the SVG objects. (When the standard is adopted, SVG capability
will be built into the browser rather than implemented as a plug-in). My
last two examples give a notion of how to apply SVG to mapping
applications. You can examine both the HTML and SVG portions of these
examples using the conventional "View Source" browser option.
It's interesting that both MapInfo and ESRI are essentially ignoring this
new development (one observer reported a "deafening silence"), and that
Macromedia considers the standard basically a "data exchange format" to be
used with proprietary software such as their "Flash." But Adobe, Sun, and
even Microsoft all seem to be quite taken with the new development.
Also, note that SVG stands for "Scalable Vector Graphics," not "Sounds Very
Good."
Robert Edwards
The MapTools Company
----------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put
"unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
