Jon, That was beautifully written. Thank you for your work and advocacy in the SVG community. What's the next step for our community to take, regarding items 3, 4, and 5?
Margie On 9/6/06, jon_ferraiolo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 > > Messages in this topic > <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/message/56704;_ylc=X3oDMTM2cGwwcGptBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzEyOTg0MjEEZ3Jwc3BJZAMxNjAxMDMwMzg5BG1zZ0lkAzU2NzIzBHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA3Z0cGMEc3RpbWUDMTE1NzU4OTQ0MgR0cGNJZAM1NjcwNA-->( > 12) Reply (via web post) > <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJxMXB1ZjZzBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzEyOTg0MjEEZ3Jwc3BJZAMxNjAxMDMwMzg5BG1zZ0lkAzU2NzIzBHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA3JwbHkEc3RpbWUDMTE1NzU4OTQ0Mg--?act=reply&messageNum=56723>| > Start > a new topic > <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/post;_ylc=X3oDMTJlaGJqa3IwBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzEyOTg0MjEEZ3Jwc3BJZAMxNjAxMDMwMzg5BHNlYwNmdHIEc2xrA250cGMEc3RpbWUDMTE1NzU4OTQ0Mg--> > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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