Hi Pat, Now that I am a member of the community and no longer an employee of Adobe, here is my reaction:
(1) First off, I believe that Adobe deserves a great amount of appreciation for their contributions to SVG and the open standards world for their activities in previous years. Adobe provided a high-quality free implementation of an SVG viewer at large expense. (Pat, you know this perhaps better than anyone.) Adobe also has provided (and presumably will continue to provide) excellent support for SVG in some of its products, particularly Illustrator. Adobe has also made large contributions within the standards community on SVG. (2) It is understandable that at some point Adobe would announce the end-of-life for Adobe SVG Viewer. Since the Macromedia acquisition (at least, perhaps even earlier), it is clear that Adobe doesn't consider the SVG viewer to be strategic. Also, browsers are adding SVG support natively. (3) HOWEVER, I believe that some of the details regarding this end-of-life announcement are unacceptable to the community and not in Adobe's own best interests. To me, it is OK to stop "support" (presumably developer support and security fixes) on Adobe SVG Viewer in the relative near-term, but instead of giving four months of advanced notice (i.e., 1/1/07), it should be something measured in years, something in the range of 2-4 years. (Note: 5 years is the usual amount for developer-oriented software.) (4) It reflects badly on Adobe that it did not donate the ASV source code (at least the higher-level logic that sits above the graphics rendering engine) to open soure. If Adobe isn't going to use ASV, then it should give it to the community so they can use it. Given how Adobe promoted industry adoption of ASV in the early days and thereby convinced many developers to build mission-critical applications using SVG, it is the least that Adobe could do. (5) But the worst part of this announcement is the removal of ASV downloads as of 1/1/08, with no option for others to host a different ASV download site. As others have pointed out, this will be devastating to those poor souls who made a commitment to ASV in the past and need their deployed SVG applications to continue working in IE, which today has something like 80% market share and is unlikely to support SVG natively before a couple of years go by. This particular decision reflects badly on Adobe as a business partner with developers. If nothing else, I appeal to Adobe to rethink this part of their decision. How much does it cost a company to maintain a single web page that is already working? If ASV quits working in some situations, such as ASV not running under Vista, then just add text to the download page alerting people that ASV has been EOL'd and is known not to work with Vista. (But the better approach would be to open source ASV so that the community can fix any such bugs.) Jon Ferraiolo IBM > Adobe has decided to discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer. There > are a number of other third-party SVG viewer implementations in the > marketplace, including native support for SVG in many Web browsers. > The SVG language and its adoption in the marketplace have both matured > to the point where it is no longer necessary for Adobe to provide an > SVG viewer. > > SVG is an established vector image format. Adobe currently supports > SVG in several of its authoring and server products, including > Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Version Cue, Graphics Server, > FrameMaker, and FrameMaker Server. > > Adobe customer support for Adobe SVG Viewer will be discontinued on > January 1, 2007. > > For more information on this decision and answers to questions about > the discontinuation of Adobe SVG Viewer, please see > http://www.adobe.com/svg ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Check out the new improvements in Yahoo! Groups email. http://us.click.yahoo.com/7EuRwD/fOaOAA/yQLSAA/1U_rlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ----- 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/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> 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/
