On Thursday, September 7, 2006, 6:06:25 PM, Marc wrote:

MV> Hi Chris,

MV>

MV> I respectfully disagree.

That's OK in turn, I disagree with some of what you say below while
agreeing with other parts.

MV> The SVG community has been pushed into Adobe's arms for too long

Agreed, although the pushing was in the very early days and much of the
adhesion has been rather ill-considered (eg making sites that *only*
work in ASV 1, or 2 or 3, etc).

MV> and it is
MV> time to realize that Adobe is now focusing its strategy on Flash, not SVG.

I think that was clear pretty soon after the merger was announced.

MV> Suggesting that Adobe will continue to support SVG in its product line

As I said, I think they will, while there is demand. They sell authoring
tools. They don't sell the viewer, nor AFAIK did they seek to really
license it much for embedding as a component. It makes sense for them to
end of life ASV since an updated version has not been released for a
long time, there are other implementations, and they make no money off
it while at the same time keeping it around consumes resources (eg for
security patches, porting to Vista, etc)

MV> and
MV> that it is therefore OK to rely on Adobe to get authoring tools for the
MV> mobile world is..

... is ... not what I said. "rely on" in particular is entirely missing
in my statement, and interpolated by yourself.

MV> well, I don't know how to qualify this.

MV> The next release of Illustrator will perhaps - only perhaps - support SVG
MV> because the next version was already on its way when the merger between
MV> Adobe and Macromedia was made official.

Right. And it takes effort to remove it and so while there is demand it
will persist; it might even get better, who knows. The point is that
this is a product on which they make money, so its different to a free
giveaway on which they loose money.

MV> But it is quite plausible that the
MV> Flash-Lite team will want it killed to stop SVG's progression in the mobile
MV> world.

Yes, thats certainly possible. Given that Illustrator supports a wide
range of export formats I think its unlikely, however that a given one
will be pulled while there is demand, because that might translate to
lost sales.

MV> The other product supporting SVG Tiny (Golive) will likely see
MV> another release, but should be merged into Dreamweaver in the near future.

Possibly. GoLive and Dreamweaver aim at pretty different mmarkest.
dreamweaver has always been the 'street HTML' product, ignoring what
standards say in favor of what the currently popular HTML implementatins
do.

GoLive, while it started out as another nested-tables-and-sliced images
product, has moved more to an XML based, standards based and mobile
based product. So I consider it much less likely that they will be
merged, or one dropped and the other promoted, than is the case for say,
Illustrator and Freehand (where I bet Freehand sank like a stone within
minutes of the merger), or the Flash authoring tools from Macromedia
compared to, say, LiveMotion (stone analogy, similarly).

MV> Do you believe Dreamweaver will support a competitor to Flash and
MV> Flash-Lite?

I think Dreamweaver will continue to support whatever the HTML desktop
browsers do and will continue to ignore the standards based and
mobile-based areas.

None of which argues, as you have suggested, that people "rely on" the
Adobe authoring tools, either for desktop or mobile. They are just one
choice - your company sells a different choice as do yet other
companies. And for the free authoring tools, Inkscape gets better with
every release.

MV> About SVG 1.1 being included with the Flash-Lite viewer, it is worth noting
MV> that SVG is just an option and that nobody is using it (to my knowledge).

I agree that its an option and is there because otherwise they could not
even start to sell the product. People who want mobile Flash get Flash
Lite; people who want mobile SVG go to other places, like Ikivo and
Bitflash, who have track record with the technology.

MV> Besides, SVG 1.1 is way too limited to be useful on a device.

Presumably you mean Tiny 1.1? Its fine for some things - but Tiny 1.2 is
way better agreed.

Summary - Adobe announced they are dropping ASV. No real surprise there.
Better than just leaving it to rot, as it clearly signals to people to
look for a different solution - of which there are several on both
desktop and mobile.

MV> From: SVG-Mobile@yahoogroups.com [mailto:SVG-Mobile@yahoogroups.com] On
MV> Behalf Of Chris Lilley
MV> Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 8:43 AM
MV> To: kubik_sj
MV> Cc: SVG-Mobile@yahoogroups.com
MV> Subject: Re: [SVG-Mobile] Comments on Adobe's stance and how it effects SVG
MV> mobile

MV>

MV> On Thursday, September 7, 2006, 5:04:02 PM, kubik_sj wrote:

k>> Hey all,
k>> Still here; I'm lurking almost everyday on the groups. Because I must
k>> be IRC illiterate, I can't chat with the SVG folks live. So I'm
k>> posting my question here... what affect is the removal of the SVG
k>> Viewer going to have on SVG's mobile applications?

MV> Hi Sara,

MV> It has no effect on SVG mobile since it did not run on any mobile platform.

MV> There was no announcement made about SVG support in FlashLite 1.1 (which
MV> does run on mobile) nor on SVG Tiny export in authoring tools. Since both of
MV> those are sold, not free, they are more likely tocontinue as long as there
MV> is demand. IMHO.

--
Chris Lilley mailto:chris@...
Interaction Domain Leader
Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
W3C Graphics Activity Lead
Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG