On Sun, 2006-02-05 at 00:01 -0700, Joshua Zeidner wrote:
>  I caught some of your speech at the last SCALE.  Very cool stuff.  I
> didn't know you were a Phoenician( that is until D Ulhman mentioned he
> had a meeting with you ).

Thank you.  Actually, I no longer live in Phoenix, but I did for a few
years.  I still try to contribute to the PLUG lists though.  I currently
live in LA, so SCALE is now local for me :)

> I have spent some time with SVG using Apache Batik.  I have played
> with Inkscape, its a nice package.  What do you see for the future of
> SVG given Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia?  How will this change SVGs
> role in internet and desktop apps?  Do you see it as a replacement for
> Flash?  Do you see a demand for commercial apps based in SVG?  What is
> the current state of SVG for Mozilla? 

Well, from the perspective of the Adobe-Macromedia merger, I don't know
what state SVG is in there.  Adobe has said that they'll continue to
support it, but that could change.  Macromedia did support SVG-Tiny in
their mobile player, but authoring tools are the real question.  I heard
that the SVG output in Illustrator CS2 was much improved, so someone is
getting time to work on it.

SVG overall is gaining a lot of momentum.  SVG is now in Firefox,
Seamonkey, Opera, Safari (beta currently) and there is still the Adobe
plugin.  It seems the only browser not supporting SVG natively is IE.
And most IE users seem to have the Adobe plugin.

On the Linux desktop, it seems like everything in SVG now.  Almost all
of the graphics in applications like GNOME-Games are SVG.  Icons are
being converted everyplace.  With toolkits like GTK+ converting over to
using Cairo natively, the vectored desktop is coming, and vector icons
are required for that conversion.

I think one of the biggest things that will effect SVG over time is
AJAX.  I know of one guy who's company is replacing their native
application with an AJAX based in browser application.  Because SVG is
XML based, and with cool things like PostGIS, you can get SVG fragments
and update the DOM on the fly for really sophisticated applications.
Today whether your application is web based or native seems to be more
of a business decision than a technical one.

As a replacement for Flash, while SVG supports it, I haven't seen anyone
doing typical Flash type animations with SVG.  I'm not sure why this is,
but I just haven't seen it.  This may be caused by the need for the next
level of authoring tools to become available.  I have heard that there
are tons of SVG cell phone games in Japan though -- I haven't seen any.

I hope that's the overview you were looking for.  I'm pretty positive on
SVG right now, of course we'll see who wins in the future.  I always
like voting for the open standard :)

		--Ted