Our CompSci department has approved a new course to start offering in the fall of 2012: Web Graphics. It'll deal a bit with <canvas>, JavaScript, color theory, graphical algorithms, CSS and, of course, SVG (if there is any left after the CSS invaders have taken their plunder!). I'm interested in equipping the labs (for these courses and half a dozen other web programming courses) with proper software.
The last time we had such a discussion here, one or three years ago I asked people where they did their SVG development and the notes at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/wiki/Authoring_tools_and_editors were an attempt to consolidate the results at that time. Since then, a few utterly predictable things happened though: Microsoft decided to support SVG (duh!); Adobe reversed course and came back into the sweet spot; Silverlight and Flash started to look a lot less promising and, lo and behold, SVG is sort of now, the only game in town (unless you want to hire unemployed JavaScript programmers to write 400 line <canvas> programs for you) for doing declarative graphics, animation and the like).* Adobe's authoring suite seems to be making considerable inroads into the SVG arena as their presentations at SVG Open indicated, but what else is going on? Has anyone experimented with HTML -KIT Tools? I see they have a lot of new SVG 1.1 support. How about new versions of OxyGen. Is Aptana any closer to recognizing that SVG has entered center stage? Have any of the seven dwarves (notepad ++, Komposer, textpad, GEdit, etc.) given us a way of previewing SVG without having to save and open a browser? Do Firebug or Dragonfly yet realize that authoring is not always modifying existing code? Does Inkscape or SVG Edit yet give us a code-hinting and code completion in an editing window for those who need to program their graphics? So many questions! The "proper" environment has all that, and the ability to modify drawings in a GUI and go back and forth to ones markup (it'd be nice if as I stretch the graphic or drag it, it would also create appropriate <animate> or <replicate> as requested), and a flow-chart editor for filters that displays intermediate results, in little boxes, sort of like that thing Patrick Dengler showed us a couple of months ago. Right now I'm leaning toward Dreamweaver, but other opinions are very welcome. In addition to outfitting the labs, I'm also interested in keeping the page at SVG/IG current (heck, it's live editable web space!) and who knows, maybe while I'm at it, I'll write a book too! Cheers David *Or I suppose you can work really hard to make sure that no shred of geometric semantics is left in markup and then all aspects of the visual cortex are rendered as mere artifacts of "presentation" and thence the W3C may confine its standards to the temporal lobe where "text" used to be processed, at least ancestrally, when it was all about sound for a time, and after we started picking vegetables[1]. [1] http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svgOpen2009/blurb4.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ----- 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: [email protected] [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/
