Comments on: SVG support in Firefox 3

By: Gazelle in the browser » Josh the Outspoken

Gazelle in the browser » Josh the Outspoken — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:25:35 +0000

[...] JavaScript and HTML, the web is not such a bad platform these days — especially now that SVG support is getting really good. SVG is the perfect tool for drawing graphs, styling the nodes in various ways, and having them do [...]

By: stelt

stelt — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:10:53 +0000

Many SVG examples to try out at my SVG link resource http://svg.startpagina.nl

By: Niels Grundtvig Nielsen

Niels Grundtvig Nielsen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:59:06 +0000

Hm. I’m writing a music catalogue page, with the first line of each score as embedded svg. Works like a charm in Firefox 3.0 on a W*ws box, but strange results on ubuntu: only text elements scale correctly with browser controls

Any hints or tips for resolving this? gratefully received!

By: Edd

Edd — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:13:41 +0000

Here’s a demo of some the cool things you could do :http://clockamatics.googlepages.com/live.html

Those clocks were written for Linux desktop in svg, all they needed to work in Firefox was javascript.

By: Jeff Schiller

Jeff Schiller — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:27:11 +0000

FYI – Opera 9 and Safari 3 have similiar level of support for SVG. Firefox 3.1 should have some level of support for declarative animations (SMIL) as should the next version of Safari (after 3.1). Opera has had SMIL and SVG support for years.

The only browser really not playing the SVG game at the moment is Internet Explorer.

By: Matt Brubeck

Matt Brubeck — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:03:00 +0000

P.S. I was worried that DojoX GFX would have dependencies on a lot of the other (huge) Dojo libraries, but it looks like the dependencies are very minimal. So, that’s another point in Dojo’s favor.

By: Matt Brubeck

Matt Brubeck — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:00:12 +0000

I haven’t tried out dojox.gfx yet – still working down my list of libraries to try. It looks pretty usable and mature. (Raphael on the other hand was first released last week, so it’s hard to say yet.)

My use case is pretty simple (just some black-and-white line drawing), so it probably won’t make that much difference which library I use. At that level, they all have the same features. If I chose Raphael it would probably be because it would be less intimidating to customize or debug the library myself. On the other hand with a more mature library I might not need to.

By: josh

josh — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:32:26 +0000

@Matt: how is Raphaël different than DojoX GFX? Just that it's more minimalistic?

By: Matt Brubeck

Matt Brubeck — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:34:37 +0000

I just found Raphaël, which is just the SVG-based, jQuery-like JavaScript library I've been searching for! Vector graphics, here I come...

By: Matt Brubeck

Matt Brubeck — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 19:09:39 +0000

Yes, DOM manipulation of XHTML/SVG compound documents should work the same everywhere – it’s just the XML DOM at work.

As for canvas, it’s way less capable than SVG but also makes some simple things much simpler (and potentially faster). For example, from these slides:

SVG

var rect = document.createElementNS(SVG_NS, “rect”);
rect.setAttribute(”x”, “5″);
rect.setAttribute(”y”, “5″);
rect.setAttribute(”width”, “20″);
rect.setAttribute(”height”, “20″);
rect.setAttribute(”fill”, “red”);
parent.appendChild(rect);

Canvas

with (ctx) {
fillStyle = “red”;
fillRect(5, 5, 20, 20);
}

But SVG makes other things simple that are impossible in Canvas without implementing your own “document model” on top of it.

For simple programmatic drawing without much animation, they’re pretty close to equivalent in speed and code.