RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
** This is all my personal opinion ** I think its worth noting that I have nothing against SVG... what I do have a problem with is zealotry in the face of real-world, practical content consumption. If the BBC released something as unsupported and unusable as this ONS app we would have users complaining in their droves - costing a fortune. People have had a few years to try the SVG plugins, or install a more competent browser. People expect to be able to be able to access content without installing a new browser or plugin. With SVG a very large proportion of people can't do this. yet you want to block my use of the site with Flash because you're lazy? Catering for over 95% of users vs well under 20% of users is deemed lazy... then yes I am lazy. I did suggest building several versions for people that don't have the ability to run Flash... so that pretty much 100% of users could access it. Flash (v7?) didn't come with Windows, *you* had to install it for some reason or other. What's the difference to this? Wrong. Flash v6 (which this app it appears is easily achievable in) is bundled with Windows XP. Various Flash players are bundled with IE, FF and Opera releases. I'm on a managed desktop (along with whole swathes of the corporate world) - it's installed and updated automatically. Your in a minority - one that would have got the fall-back version if it had been developed differently. I am. But why should I be a second class citizen? Why should I when my corporate-controlled desktop won't allow me to install an unsigned app? Flash, Javascript and a server-side apps would all work perfectly. I'm suggesting a solution where the app would roll back just for people who can't get the plugin - less than 5% if Flash was used? The SVG viewer suggested by ONS is 2.3mb! Standards exist so everyone can enjoy things, a concept a few companies don't understand. Huh? Nobody is arguing against standards. Its just that this one seemingly isn't finished, the plugins aren't finished and it doesn't work to a standard where it could be used by home users. Server-side processing requires being online It also requires no javascript or any plugins whatsoever. I can't imagine that hardly anyone realises that the ONS app can be run offline. J - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
Jason Cartwright [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Catering for over 95% of users vs well under 20% of users is deemed lazy... then yes I am lazy. I did suggest building several versions for people that don't have the ability to run Flash... so that pretty much 100% of users could access it. I don't agree with your argument. There are good reasons NOT to do this. 95% of users could be said to use Windows... which would be an argument for only testing on IE, if something breaks there you can't possibly do it, right? Whether you agree or not that MS has a monopoly (and the courts say that they do) this behaviour would certainly create a monopolist. Back in the days before flash was nearlly everywhere people still used it - pushing the envelope of what the web could do. SVG is just doing the same. Better plugins would be good... other routes to SVG implementation would be good (how about something that transforms to flash?) but I don't agree in not doing it even if 95% have to get a plugin to use it. Another point about SVG, if I may, is that it can be processed away from the browser. Maybe people can do mashups with the raw SVG. They couldn't do that with Flash. -- Nic Ferrier http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk for all your tapsell ferrier needs - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
** This is all my personal opinion ** I'm not for or against publishing in any particular format - like everyone else I just want it to work. My problem was with this idea that SVG was good enough (what is 'good enough' is subjective) for this task, and should receive praise for being used. It blatently isn't 'good enough' for the vast majority of the audience, as the user experience is dreadful. Flash, whilst much better, isn't 'good enough' either, and that should have a fallback option (a couple were suggested). There is nothing stopping them publishing the data used out as CSVs, XML, ABC, XYZ, whatever, of course - and that is something that statistics.gov.uk does all the time. The BBC guidelines (to compare) on this plugin issue are pretty clear: SVG isn't to be used (without a business case to gain an exception), and For core content presented using a plugin, you MUST provide alternative content http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/newmedia/desed/multimedia_plugins_flash. shtml J -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nic James Ferrier Sent: 17 January 2007 10:21 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report Jason Cartwright [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Catering for over 95% of users vs well under 20% of users is deemed lazy... then yes I am lazy. I did suggest building several versions for people that don't have the ability to run Flash... so that pretty much 100% of users could access it. I don't agree with your argument. There are good reasons NOT to do this. 95% of users could be said to use Windows... which would be an argument for only testing on IE, if something breaks there you can't possibly do it, right? Whether you agree or not that MS has a monopoly (and the courts say that they do) this behaviour would certainly create a monopolist. Back in the days before flash was nearlly everywhere people still used it - pushing the envelope of what the web could do. SVG is just doing the same. Better plugins would be good... other routes to SVG implementation would be good (how about something that transforms to flash?) but I don't agree in not doing it even if 95% have to get a plugin to use it. Another point about SVG, if I may, is that it can be processed away from the browser. Maybe people can do mashups with the raw SVG. They couldn't do that with Flash. -- Nic Ferrier http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk for all your tapsell ferrier needs - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
** 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.statisti http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pic/ cs.gov.uk/pic/ or point your SVG enabled browser directly to http://www.statisti http://www.statistics.gov.uk/PIC/index.html cs.gov.uk/PIC/index.html For feedback: svg [at] ons.gov.uk and btw the bbc link is http://news. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6263571.stm bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6263571.stm cheers Jonathan Chetwynd
RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
I feel obligated to do this DISCLAIMER: these are my views - I, not the bbc, should be held responsible for any buffoonery contained herein more svg: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/DRAWINGS/clock_plain.svg but as a Flash developer my first reaction to any current svg content is nice try, thanks for playing, we'll keep your details on file but really you need to come back when you're bigger and stronger but perhaps by then, Adobe may have open sourced Flash much as Sun have done with java freeing the pursuit of accessibility of the swf format to be driven by something other than market forces. A man can dream. just my 2p From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Chetwynd 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.statisti http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pic/ cs.gov.uk/pic/ or point your SVG enabled browser directly to http://www.statisti http://www.statistics.gov.uk/PIC/index.html cs.gov.uk/PIC/index.html For feedback: svg [at] ons.gov.uk and btw the bbc link is http://news. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6263571.stm bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6263571.stm cheers Jonathan Chetwynd
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.statisti http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pic/ cs.gov.uk/pic/ or point your SVG enabled browser directly to http://www.statisti http://www.statistics.gov.uk/PIC/index.html cs.gov.uk/PIC/index.html For feedback: svg [at] ons.gov.uk and btw the bbc link is http://news. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6263571.stm bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6263571.stm cheers Jonathan Chetwynd
RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
IMHO: Technology can't hang around for the slow people to migrate, can it? One has to accept that IE 7 users need to install a plugin or go without. Flip side is, if the majority of your audience need to download a plugin to view something... will they actually bother? Or indeed can they (think work PCs etc). Like it or not, Internet Explorer users are a huge chunk of the browsers out there - and how many have SVG? That's not to say that no one should use new technology - just that the developer need to be aware that just because they're moving quickly, doesn't mean everyone else is! 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. It's slow for me too, but I'm burning a DVDR and running BOINC in the background... it's perfectly readable though, very tidy. Have to say it was so painful for me on my creaky 3.5 year old work PC, that I gave up after less than a minute. SVG may be great. But if it doesn't work for me, I'm going to give up. Hey, I'm lazy :) - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
** This is all my personal opinion ** Technology can't hang around for the slow people to migrate, can it? If you want people to use it (which the government should) then you should cater for a low commmon denominator. Using your thinking people should be broadcasting TV only in digital and turning off the analog signal right? more people have access to SVG in their browser than Flash access to - a telling choice of words. People shouldn't have to install a plugin - it should just work. Which it would have done for the vast, vast majority if they had developed it with consideration for the actual statistics of the audience. (spoken from someone on 64bit linux and BeOS...) Your in a minority - one that would have got the fall-back version if it had been developed differently. The other 95%+ users would have got a fully working version without any security error messages, downloads, or installs. you can save the SVG to your desktop and work from 'home' Work? It's an tiny little app that adds up some numbers! Its not like they are doing anything particually complex that only SVG can do, right? I found another bug BTW. Pressing backspace in a text box occasionally takes FF2.0 back a page (like when you have nothing selected on an HTML page, and you press backspace to go back). SVG: J -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Drinkwater Sent: 16 January 2007 15:39 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report I'm very impressed that they've used SVG, and for some of the tutorial animations on bbc.news.co.uk I wish they would do the same! On 16/01/07, Jason Cartwright [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ** This is all my personal opinion ** 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. IMHO: Technology can't hang around for the slow people to migrate, can it? One has to accept that IE 7 users need to install a plugin or go without. 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. It's slow for me too, but I'm burning a DVDR and running BOINC in the background... it's perfectly readable though, very tidy. Give me a Flash version A poor choice, more people have access to SVG in their browser than Flash (spoken from someone on 64bit linux and BeOS...) or javascript version, falling back to doing the processing serverside rather than this tech demo rubbish. As a fallback, it would've been a good idea - but they want to develop once, and get everyone to use that version. Plus serverside processing is a little pointless here - you can save the SVG to your desktop and work from 'home' :) Cheers, John -- John '[Beta]' Drinkwater http://johndrinkwater.name/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
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 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
On 16/01/07, Andrew Bowden [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: IMHO: Technology can't hang around for the slow people to migrate, can it? One has to accept that IE 7 users need to install a plugin or go without. Flip side is, if the majority of your audience need to download a plugin to view something... will they actually bother? Or indeed can they (think work PCs etc). They might not, this time. The more SVGs are used, the more uptake it will have. Anyhow, it seemed to happen quite easily for Flash :) but no one seems to bring that up when they're debating the use of it? I can't view Flash on this system, and regularly face pages without fallback content. Not even a chance. Jason should feel lucky an SVG plugin exists! Like it or not, Internet Explorer users are a huge chunk of the browsers out there - and how many have SVG? Few, but whose fault is that ? And what can be done to remedy it? Encouraging SVG use! Have to say it was so painful for me on my creaky 3.5 year old work PC, that I gave up after less than a minute. SVG may be great. But if it doesn't work for me, I'm going to give up. Hey, I'm lazy :) Totally true - and I conceded that in my last point as a fallback option - then again, it does something soo simple that a few paragraphs of explanatory text and a pocket calculator could do. :) John -- John '[Beta]' Drinkwater http://johndrinkwater.name/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
Hi Tom, On 16/01/07, Tom Pearson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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). I think you'll find this is an implementation issue - Opera is far quicker to render SVG than Firefox. So much that you wouldn't notice it being SVG. I presume that will change with Firefox 3 using cairo... - 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. There is a penatly for using XML, true. Have you tried to gzip your SVG files ? Most browser clients can easily accept .svg.gz files just like a normal .svg Otherwise, i'd still expect Flash to optimize that coast line. I'd be interested to look at those SVG files btw, but I assume they're OS copyrighted? Oh, I think this is the first time I've posted here, so hello everyone! Nice to meet you. Tom [1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2005/flash_map/html/map05.stm -- John '[Beta]' Drinkwater http://johndrinkwater.name/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
I completely forgot something, but since Tom mentioned it.. I too am new here, so Hey everyone! On 16/01/07, Jason Cartwright [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ** This is all my personal opinion ** Technology can't hang around for the slow people to migrate, can it? If you want people to use it (which the government should) then you should cater for a low commmon denominator. Using your thinking people should be broadcasting TV only in digital and turning off the analog signal right? Of course that will happen - some people with analog TVs *will* be left behind. ( I can't get digital TV or Channel 5 via an aerial myself because of my location and geography. I purchase Sky. I dont agree with it, but I understand where things are heading. But this is quite off-topic. ) If we catered to the lowest common denominator, we'd still have fox-hunting, hanging, and slavery ;) People have had a few years to try the SVG plugins, or install a more competent browser. It's not like it suddenly appeared. Now some sites are saying SVG is here, use it! and you're alarmed? Maybe we need a deadline for SVG acceptance much like the analog TV switchoff? more people have access to SVG in their browser than Flash access to - a telling choice of words. People shouldn't have to install a plugin - it should just work. Which it would have done for the vast, vast majority if they had developed it with consideration for the actual statistics of the audience. Yes, I said access to to make a point. You're the person being given a choice and choosing not to. I don't have the luxury of choice (atm, Gnash is coming), yet you want to block my use of the site with Flash because you're lazy? Flash (v7?) didn't come with Windows, *you* had to install it for some reason or other. What's the difference to this? (spoken from someone on 64bit linux and BeOS...) Your in a minority - one that would have got the fall-back version if it had been developed differently. The other 95%+ users would have got a fully working version without any security error messages, downloads, or installs. I am. But why should I be a second class citizen? Standards exist so everyone can enjoy things, a concept a few companies don't understand. you can save the SVG to your desktop and work from 'home' Work? It's an tiny little app that adds up some numbers! Its not like they are doing anything particually complex that only SVG can do, right? It was a suggestion about the completeness of that example, nothing more. Server-side processing requires being online, whereas you can easily load that SVG from cache/desktop and use it while offline. /rant John -- John '[Beta]' Drinkwater http://johndrinkwater.name/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] SVG used by Office of National Statistics in BBC business report
Tom, adobe Illustrator is well known for producing large file sizes, possibly slimly related to printing. a literally blank document can be 460kb, don't ask, I just opened Illustrator and saved a blank document ~: be sure to untick all the SVG options and this can be reduced to 4kb, hint: tick for larger file size... having said which it may be that few people would chose to use Illustrator out of choice for small file size map making. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/censusmaps/mainmap.svgz is but one example at 112kb quite possibly not what you had in mind, but this one has county boundaries for England the file size could probably be halved if required. cheers Jonathan Chetwynd On 16 Jan 2007, at 17:01, Tom Pearson wrote: 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
