Hi,

I don't really know where AutoDesk is going with SVG but perhaps some
speculation (perhaps too much) is in order.

At one time AutoDesk had announced an SVG plotter output driver. One of
their people published a whitepaper on SVG. There was also a hint of SVG in
LandDesk. We even provided a few phone demos showing some primitive SVG
capabilities to a group of product managers. However, the next release
pulled out the SVG plotting and they seemed to downplay SVG altogether. I
met the whitepaper author at an Autodesk developer's meeting last year. He
seemed to indicate that AutoDesk didn't have room for an SVG plot capability
in the current release, something about software bloat etc. This sounded
like a familiar spin or newspeak for we dropped it and don't want to talk
about it.
There was also some momentum toward a design XML which I have not followed
very closely. This was basically an XML grammar for transport of the core
data structure of a DWG design file specifically suitable for AutoCAD
developers but not meant to be a general graphic grammar.

Now there seems to be an ad campaign directed against Adobe (
http://usa.autodesk.com ) which is curious since Adobe doesn't even have a
directly competitive product in the CAD sense, only in the Internet
publishing sense. Certainly conceptually the "document" should eventually
absorb the "Engineering drawing" and "Document" is a very strong core in the
Adobe product line. But the future is still up for grabs in the XML document
arena and AutoDesk has a great deal of strength even if they have lacked
innovation since the loss of their original development/management team.
(Carol Bartz successfully transformed AutoDesk from a cool technology firm
to a lucrative but ho-hum software marketing firm)

Some pure speculation:
Does AutoDesk sense the possibility that the technology is moving in a web
application direction? This of course would pose a future threat to core
workstation products. Their answer is DWF<->VoloView which is unheard of
outside the AutoCAD community. Their original grasp of SVG was a nice little
public graphic for exporting static DWG files in an innocuous sense.
However, on closer examination SVG is not so innocuous in fact it is
extremely dangerous to a business based on decades old technology! Then, the
apparent leader in SVG viewers is currently Adobe and consequently SVG has
been associated with Adobe branding, perhaps unfortunately for SVG. (I think
Corel is doing a great service for w3c SVG by creating a brand alternative
and moving SVG away from a single brand association)

It's worth reviewing what SVG provides that isn't available in alternative
offerings:
1. Open - not proprietary
2. XML - readable and useable
3. event listeners
4. Internet
5. Internet
6. Internet
.
.

DWF is binary - proprietary - requires VoloView tm of Autodesk - works only
on the Windows OS - is difficult to customize, even when buying fully into
AutoDesk/Microsoft products.

The big deal with SVG for those of us from other graphic format backgrounds
isn't the viewing at all, but the connections, the links, it makes possible.
Event listeners make the difference! Conceivably SVG compels us to think
about webs of drawings not just static drawings, not even dynamic but
disconnected drawings, but object level linking across the Internet cloud.
Events on clients allow us to make editors and nifty client affects, etc
the kind of stuff Flash popularized, but even more than this events connect
to the big world out there. SVG is the first graphics language for the
Internet and design files can now connect across the world. Once a full set
of mutation events are implemented can you imagine the type of parametric
webs that can be created? SVG mutation events with XLink Xpointer move
slowly but inexorably into a fully parameterized design environment.
Note: parametric drawing refers to the linkage between a paramater and a
graphic object, changes to one implicitly change the other and changes
others ... which is a big deal in manufacturing drawings where revisions
need to cascade through a chain of documents and vendors.

Of course the vendors like AutoDesk/Microsoft would be able to do this
technically as well but I don't think they quite grasp the enormity of the
situation, or when they do catch glimpses, it scares them into circling the
wagons around the money making products. At least Microsoft still has their
first generation leadership and recognizes the power of technical
innovation, but AutoDesk doesn't have that kind of leadership.

Perhaps AutoDesk fears the world that SVG opens and especially Adobe since
they are apparently back on track to exploit SVG's capabilities. At this
rate the "internet document" future is not going to go to AutoDesk and even
Adobe seems a bit nervous about the Tiger they have by the tail.

Remember this is purely bloggish speculation from an entirely outside
observer but fun to think about.

randy

-----Original Message-----
From: Eduard Lukschandl [mailto:eduard@...]
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 3:32 AM
To: svg-developers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [svg-developers] DWF from Autodesk


Has anyone noticed how Autodesk pushes for its elderly drawing file format
for the web?
3 years ago, before I discovered SVG, I have been taking a look at it, and I
can tell you, it has been _very_ hard to find info about the syntax and had
to write my own tools to read/write DWF-files.
Then there was silence.
Now Autodesk promotes it on their home-page, aggressivly positioning it
against Adobe's PDF. They even provide the DWF 6.0 Toolkit, a C++ library
for manipulating DWF files.
No word about SVG though. Does that mean that they do not see any danger
from that direction?
What should we do?
- Eduard



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