SVG vs SWF, Seven Years Later
About seven years ago I made a swf to svg converter. It converted all graphics and animations and played fine (if a bit herky jerky) in the Adobe SVG player. As far as I know all markup was legal and approved (I avoided any player specific hacks and scripting). Now with an increasing interest in svg due to Html5 and Apple, I thought I’d revisit the project. Chrome and Mozilla can play SVG content now, IE might one day, who knows, maybe it can finally be useful!
Or not. For a final demo, I shrank and spliced an old Flash3 animation that showed off what the converter could do without choking the player. While it didn’t look set to take over, it was a start – like many people I really wanted vector control at the page level so all was cool. “Imagine what the future will bring!”
Have a look for yourself:
SWF Animation
SVG Animation (warning, may take down Chrome)
Download
In Mozilla the svg just gives a blank screen. Chrome has a little more luck – it plays for a bit and then gives an ‘oh snap’ error. The swf to xaml converter we made suffered a similar fate, and broke later versions of xaml tools as well. Fwiw, all flash animation we have (going back to Flash2) runs flawlessly in the latest player, as does 99.99% of our actionscript code. This is seriously something to consider when moving your assets to html5 (or any direct play xml based format imo). But hey, you can bet on whatever horse you like – just you really should watch them warming up first – in these links above that is ; ).
SVG animation plays in Chrome, sort of (used to look great!)
…and then it dies.
I’m sure it will have uses. Any new graphic support in browsers is a good thing — just don’t bet on it replacing Flash anytime soon.
SVG has been the ‘emerging standard’ as long as I’ve known about it. I suspect it will keep emerging during my lifetime.
Is SVG cool?
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20030306.asp
Written in 2003 (I assume from the URL), still a good read…
Yeah, a lot of people are looking so hard at things like Microsoft they forget to look at themselves.
The svg spec is flawed for its purpose (eg you can’t even reuse animation markup, only graphic definitions, where is the sound sync, no color defs, what about all the ambiguous things, etc). It probably feels good for them to say that external problems are what is holding them back, but it’s far from helpful. That whole spec (including xaml) needs a total rethink.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rasheed Abdul-Aziz, Robin Debreuil. Robin Debreuil said: SVG vs SWF, Seven Years Later (blog post) http://bit.ly/bTkoPF [...]
@Robin: Have you considered using Javascript instead of CSS Anim?
@Burak: Are you are aware that IE9 is going to support SVG?
I considered that at the time, but there were issues too. A lot of players didn’t support JS, and there seemed to be a lot of cross browser/os/player JS issues as well.
I had wanted to use it as a intermediate format at the time too, so if all the animation was JS/data then it wouldn’t have been portable. In the end it wasn’t portable anyway, so maybe I should have. I’m not sure it would have worked better for framerate, maybe though.
It certainly wouldn’t have been toolable though, unless the tool was Flash I guess – though that was what I was looking to get away from at the time : ) (I had thought there was about to be a lot of svg tools, specifically from adobe).
Anyway, it was mostly an experiment to know how close it could be to replacing flash, and I concluded at the time it couldn’t. That said there are certainly things it is better for (using it for charts right now in fact : ). Its a great tool to have, but it helps no one to frame it as ‘either-or’ choice (or in the iPad case, enforce it that way).
Fair enough. That makes sense.
I must say I really was a big fan of SVG (and Adobe’s Viewer) and I even started developing a basic SVG animation tool (http://beez.sourceforge.net/ too bad SVGZ don’t show).
Then came Flash 5 and I decided to stop bothering. Then Adobe bought Macromedia and unplugged the viewer…
@claus The only version of IE I currently use, and probably will ever use, is 6.0.2900
IMO SVG will really emerge after SWF is dead, not before. SVG has its uses but it is not the long sought after ‘Flash Killer’ – at least, not yet.