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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: XML, Rich Internet Apps
 AndrewWatt2000@a... writes: >But why HTML at all? What can HTML do that SVG can't already do or >won't very soon be able to do? > >... > >And why is SVG likely to be key in this? We will need to communicate >visually to summarise the huge volumes of data that we will be >inundated with. Right. Well, let's take a look at a commercial company (you like those, right?) that has built much of its market on its early control of a language that proved very useful for putting pictures and text on paper. A PostScript interpreter is currently ordering my HP LaserJet 6MP to put toner in particular patterns on paper. I'll be (proofreading) those pages today. The document being printed is at some level a collection of pixels, but it's also a combination of text - Adobe spent an enormous amount of effort on text-rendering algorithms - and pictures. In this particular case, the primary document comes from FrameMaker, with illustrations from Freehand and Photoshop. Adobe maintains a range of products that go well beyond PostScript (and PDF). * Adobe Photoshop gives users pixel-by-pixel control over images, for those cases where a formulaic rendering process isn't ideal. (Photos are an obvious case.) * Adobe Illustrator originally was pretty much a human interface to PostScript, and operates at text+lines->image. Illustrator is a great program in many ways, but it's not aimed at multi-page layout. (Illustrations that go in other documents are an obvious use.) * Adobe InDesign and Adobe FrameMaker (not to mention PageMaker) address multi-page layout, though in fairly different ways. InDesign is oriented to custom layout by graphic designers, while FrameMaker is oriented to large-scale document production with somewhat less concern for fine-grained control over the position of snazzy design elements and more concern for automation, regularity, etc. In a lot of ways, these tool act as integrators, combining photos, illustrations, and text. I share some of your excitement about SVG, but hear your "let's forget about XHTML and just use SVG" as painfully akin to "let's just use Illustrator and never mind those page layout programs." The PostScript/SVG layer may be useful and occasionally critical, but there are an enormous number of cases where I'd much rather address that layer only when I need to do so explicitly, and prefer to use FrameMaker for the bulk of the work. There are occasions when I want to focus on SVG elements. There are practically no occasions when I want to focus on SVG to the exclusion of XHTML. I _can_ read and work with SVG and PostScript when I need to (though my PostScript's accumulated eight years of rust), but I don't think most cases demand my attention at that level. It's useful stuff, but there are an awful lot of cases where I'm much happier working with XHTML (for the Web) or something like XSL-FO (if print-only is my target.) XML+CSS gets me part of the way there, but XHTML still does more, has a much wider community of practitioners, and makes sense to me as a set of tools oriented toward its particular medium. SVG seems like something that fits beautifully in that medium, but I don't seem SVG taking over the medium. Adobe's early genius was PostScript. Adobe's wisdom was recognizing that while PostScript is very cool, there are lots of other levels worth supporting. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org 
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