On Apr 18, 2006, at 20:55, David Dailey wrote: > The fact that there has been a tenfold increase in one year in the > number of pages indexed by Google that match the keywords "SVG" and > "JavaScript" (500,000 to 6 million) might support this concept that > the investment of the efforts of "early adopters" on lists like this > in 2002-2003 is actually translating into dividends as measured by > real content being available (at least on the information nets > indexed by Google).
Yes, that is true, and in many aspects: - people back then were a lot less clueful about XML, and non-HTML DOM. A lot of the questions back then were from folks who had XML problems that weren't specific to SVG - news back then were not centralised, we now have http://svg.org - there was little in the way of a FAQ in those days, now we have the SVG Wiki - there weren't any authoring guidelines, now there are several - people were regularly having trouble installing ASV, now they use their browsers - back then almost all SVG content creation was for the desktop, where problems are harder and therefore may need more questions. Now much of SVG happens on mobile devices, where it's generally simpler (although I'd expect to start getting uDOM questions within a few months) - the authoring tools in 2002 weren't where they are today, meaning folks had to do more by hand. Now we have better support (though it's still far from perfect) - in 2002 a bunch of people were converting from a given proprietary format to SVG by coding the translation themselves, nowadays the number of tools that actually very hard to keep track of (I know I've lost count) I do think however that some of the people who were interested then are less interested today. A lot of the members of the SVG community in those days were folks who were very disappointed with the general state of the browser industry. They wanted to do rich Web content in the browser, and without resorting to proprietary formats that are also a horrible pain to manipulate in a content production workflow like SWF. Now that there's all the "Web 2.0" and AJAXy stuff (remember how many people would ask about getURL?), those folks have less reason to go to SVG. I don't think that's really a loss for the SVG community however, since I am fairly sure the same people will use SVG in browsers soon, when they need it. We certainly are not suffering from that as much as SWF/Flash, which thanks to improvements in browsers is increasingly cornered into its role as glorified animated GIF for ads :) -- Robin Berjon Senior Research Scientist Expway, http://expway.com/ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
