Comment by unleaded
6 days ago
You can do a lot of impressive things with SVGs. Some examples from Wikipedia (no JS in any)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/SMIL_mis... missile command clone
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/London_U... tube map
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Rolling_... rolling shutter animation
SVG started as an open competitor to Shockwave/Flash Player and also an application format for PDAs. It almost got networking support once.
Too bad nothing has ever come close to replacing the SWF format.
You could pack so much into a single binary distributable media file. Games, videos, websites, infographics, tools, chat rooms.
SWF was brilliant and it should have thrived.
If it weren't for Adobe's crappy support of the player, I would agree, but they did much more harm than good with it. It was a massive attack surface and they didn't care about closing their zero-day drive-by exploits in a sensible timeframe.
Also they were basically the founders of persistent fingerprinting via Flash cookies.
So no, thank you, I'm more than happy it didn't thrive more than it already did.
SWF was simultaneously brilliant and a festering wound that required amputation, and I would have welcomed a replacement that wasn't the biggest attack surface on the internet. I too love Homestar Runner.
IMO the fact that it belonged to Adobe was the biggest problem, if SWF had been managed by a more capable software org it could have been maintained in a way that kept it from getting banned from the internet. And remember, that's how bad it was - it got banned from the internet because it was absolutely indefensible to leave it around. SWF getting cancelled magically stopped every single family member I have from calling me with weird viruses and corruption they managed to stumble into. I saw more malicious code execution through SWF than I saw from my dumb little cousins torrenting sus ROMs and photoshop crackers. I'd rather not have it than have those problems persist.
absolutely. really is strange that you used to be able to download a music video in less than 2-3mb with lossless video quality, but now that's not really a thing anymore. I feel like if Adobe didn't get greedy and encourage its use for absolutely everything (and/or web standards got up to speed faster) people wouldn't wouldn't approach talking about Flash with the 10-foot pole they often do today (as a platform—not how everyone talks about how much they loved flash games)
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> It almost got networking support once.
SVG support full javascript. It has networking support.
(In web browsers the <img> tag allows only restricted subset, butbyou get the full thing with iframe)
I think the above comment refers to the proposal for SVG 1.2 (which never shipped) to include an API for opening raw network sockets: https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20040510/#rawsocket
(It observes that this feature raises certain security risks, but promises to figure out by the next draft how to fix them. This of course never happened.)
I recall Hixie had a funny rant about this, but I can't find it.
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Thank fuck it didn't. I can't fathom how quickly the obnoxious advertiser industrial complex would've grabbed hold of that and invented whole new genres of shoving products in our collective face.
as opposed to today...?
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Huh? SVG stands for scalable vector graphics.
Functionally, it can do a lot of the same things as SWF/Flash. Can do animations (see article) and it's scriptable using JavaScript for interactivity.
And JavaScript starts with Java. Naming is hard.
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I like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/London_U.... It shows step-free areas for wheelchair users. It is pretty useful to me.
As for the first link, I immediately had to come up with a way to click on the warheads programmatically. I saved the world! :D
As an American I always forget that the ADA is kind of unique in the world.
It would never even enter my mind that every single subway stop isn’t wheelchair accessible.
That checkbox feature in the Tube Map is awesome. I need to up my SVG game.
Bookmarked!
Try clicking on a line's name in the key. Very impressive map.
Wow, thank you for pointing this out. Map went from 10/10 to 11/10
That first link doesn't work in Safari, and I'm really wondering what's missing. Clicking the button works, but clicking the warheads does nothing. I also don't get the crosshairs cursors that I see when I try this in Firefox.
After reading the headline and before reading the article, I thought it'd be something like a visual hash of readme files, as an easy way to see if anything had changed between releases.
I was thinking that might be a useful thing for people to spot when a ToS, EULA, etc. changed since those are long documents that frequently get sneaky revisions.
I really like the timer display in that missile command clone. The animated numbers make it easy to keep time with it in your peripheral vision.