Several readers have written to me over the past while, asking for an update to an article that I wrote for the July, 2003 issue of MSDN Magazine. In that article, I expressed a lot of optimism for the future of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). However, based upon how the market has evolved since then, and the amazing clarity of hindsight, I have come to believe that SVG is effectively dead as a mainstream, desktop technology. To many this will be a painfully obvious fact, but I thought it had to be addressed (and it allows me to respond to queries with a courteous link). 

SVG, as a quick primer, is a vector graphics technology that allows for gorgeous layered designs using basic primitives. SVG also offers a wonderful DOM programming facility to allow for animations and programmatic alterations - I won't go into SVG in technical detail (not only are there plenty of resources out there that do, but I also don't pretend to be an expert in SVG), but I will say that in a nutshell SVG is a standardized, owned-by-no-one alternative to Flash: With a simple XML layout and clear, logical specifications, SVG was compelling in its approachability and low barrier to entry - No special authoring kits, or understanding of convoluted binary formats, was required to begin creating dynamic, vector-graphic solutions.

Nonetheless, based upon some observations and occurrences since, I will confidently state that SVG is dead on the desktop:

• Adobe has been the primary sponsor of SVG since the outset, and many believed this was largely to undermine Macromedia's Flash
• Adobe, whose plug-in viewer is by far the #1 method of client-side SVG rendering, hasn't meaningfully updated their viewer since 2001
• Corel also created an SVG viewer, but it too has completely stagnated, and that element of their graphics strategy has faded
• Even the Apache Batik project has largely stalled
• Macromedia released the Flash File Format Specification, undermining one of the primary selling points of SVG
• Flash is ubiquitous
• Adobe acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion in a deal that was approved on August 24th. Flash is an absolutely critical ingredient of Macromedia's business model. Adobe didn't put $3.4 billion towards something they plan on killing
• The remaining push for SVG seems to be for the mobile market, but even there Flash is making headway
• I was sure then that the open standards SVG would be heartily adopted and evangelized by the open source community, and I felt certain that mainstream, native support for SVG would thrive in Mozilla cum Firefox, giving it a killer-feature to take on Internet Explorer. What SVG support exists today, over two years later, is still just a fork that is described as a "technology preview"
• Microsoft is going to capture hearts and minds with XAML, and with tools like Microsoft Expression (which doesn't, to my knowledge, support SVG).
  

These, along with other factors, have led me to believe that SVG on the desktop is a non-starter, barring some jarring schism in the marketplace. I think it's too little, too late for Firefox to offer a wide deployment of SVG, and I doubt Adobe is going to do much more than let SVG fade away (of course they'll claim otherwise, but let's be honest).

I do, however, continue to believe that SVG on the server, as a component of the image processing pipeline, is still entirely viable.

[UPDATE: A followup can be found here]

I try to keep on top of the various important releases from Microsoft, testing assumptions and seeing what's new with each release. Tonight I decided to install the September 2005 CTP of Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

While it seems like a pretty trivial exercise to update to a new release - and from a difficulty perspective it is - it is remarkable how much time each of these iterations takes. While I don't need to sit here looking at the screen for the duration of the install, there nonetheless is a lot of user interaction that is necessary (even if it's just saying okay to random dialogs), and it soaks up PC resources for quite some time. First one performs all of the various deinstalls of the prior iteration, and the lengthy installs of the new one. Add in various incompatibilities just for fun. "Whoops, I have the Visual Studio July CTP .NET Framework, which is conflicting with the September CTP of SQL Server 2005". Almost sounds like ".dll hell". Of course to really keep on top, add in all of the CTPs of Visual Studio, and the other tools. You can basically fill your days uninstalling and installing various tools.

There is no real "point" here, and I can't see any possible solution (except for perhaps completely touchless installs that require zero interaction from setup.exe to finish), but it could be the reason why so few people seem to have any hands on experience with either SQL Server 2005, or Visual Studio 2005.

Made a bit of a fool of myself today, mistakingly implying that I was building webpages using brushed-aluminum backgrounds back in 1990 (my actual statement was that I was doing so "about 15 years ago", but I didn't actually think through what that would mean). In reality the date was closer to 1994, where I was building a little PC configuration tool for a retail computer shop (which was a component of a complex corporate structure that included a music store, home theatre equipment, and computer consulting and sales), allowing users to dynamically configure a PC and get a price (the server-side scripting was some innovative completely proprietary script), and then print out their config and bring it in to place an order.

The impetus for the discussion was the implication by an individual that if Microsoft used brush-metal backgrounds, clearly they're ripping off Apple (as Apple fanatics believe that Apple invented everything. I view Apple very favourable, but more times than not they're simply executing ideas better and more beautifully than people before them).

My reply was that brushed-metal backgrounds were some of the first uses of the BACKGROUND attribute: I fondly recall upgrading my PC configuration web "app" to use a classic brushed aluminum look. This was long before Apple started using brushed metals on their desktops. I was hardly an innovator, and such backgrounds were pretty common because they looked like something people could relate to in the real world, yet they could be low contrast and compatible with overlaid text. They are an obvious and inevitable background.

Outside of my chronology problem, what struck me as most disturbing was the impression some have about the state of computers in 1990 - that the ability for brushed-metal graphics to even exist was simply an impossibility. How absurd. In 1990 the Atari ST and Amiga, both very graphically rich PCs, had existed for a half-decade, and were certainly capable of creating and displaying a trivial brushed aluminum graphic. Apple was already up to the immensely powerful Apple IIfx (I lusted over ads for that "Wickedly Fast" PC). Windows was already out for 5 years, and Microsoft was already a billion dollar company. The WWW didn't exist, but a lot of us had been using bulletin board systems, and interconnected message systems (Fidonet, Usenet, and various others) for quite some time. While you couldn't run a Photoshop effect and generate a brushed metal, people would load up long-existing raster graphics programs and plug in the pixels to generate the desired effect.

The point, if there is one, is that Google didn't invent the internet, and Apple didn't invent graphics. This whole "computer thing" has been going on for a while.

I've been a Slashdot member since 1998, demonstrated by my "desirable" 4-digit UID. Papers here have been linked from Slashdot several times*, and I've submitted several stories that have been posted. I've had excellent karma for time eternal, and garner Score: 5 posts at least several times a week (it isn't exactly hard, and takes just a few minutes in an interesting story posting something of marginal interest). I try to add meaningful, well-thought out and grammatically correct comments, and I never "karma whore" (karma whoring is where someone posts with the sole intent of gaining karma, for instance posting an obvious question for further info relating to some part of the article. They don't actually bother researching it, because that would hurt their chances at getting first post, and they have no interest in the answer anyways, but nonetheless that recipe almost always yields Score: 5 (Interesting)).
 
One of the motivations for participating in Slashdot's community, quite honestly, was the quid pro quo PageRank goodness, courtesy of items like a link on your username, or a signature line (the sig is particularly spammy and is generally used for people to link to lame contests or affiliate links, but the linked username is just good form). Everytime I earned a Score: 5, it would go in the archives, autoexpanded, and would get picked up by Google, where my link would give me some ranking goodness in return. It was, in a sense, a marginal form of payment for my contribution to Slashdot. The user moderation system ensured that spam comments would never get expanded in the archives, and thus it shouldn't (depending on how Slashdot served up pages for Google) earn spammers any rewards.

I'm not sure when, but sometime over the past year (I presume), Slashdot switched to adding nofollow on all user outgoing links, so basically even Score: 5 posts yield no benefits outside of nebulous Slashdot karma. This is especially odd because Slashdot is the one site where I have almost never seen comment spam (outside of GNAA/Goatse type stuff). It seems like a pretty irrelevant thing, but suddenly my marginal interest in being involved with the Slashdot community has declined to zero. Ultimately I am selfish (like most humans), and I like to feel like there is some sort of reward for my efforts. If I'm expending efforts for someone else's benefit, I like to think that I'm earning namespace (which isn't really the case when you post on many disparate online sites, with no common user identity), or some other sort of reward. PageRank was a pretty cheap reward.

Will Slashdot die because I don't contribute? Probably not. But in my heart of hearts Slashdot is dead.

*- The oft feared "Slashdot Effect" isn't even remotely as intense as many people imagine. Basically the only reason some sites fall over is because they're 100% dynamic, generating everything on the fly from databases, going through transformations, etc. These sites often can't serve even a dozen users over a couple second period without falling over. This site, yafla.com, is almost entirely static (just as I chose my blogging software based upon it being static), and where it is dynamic it uses intelligent caching. Even on a low-end shared server this can easily facilitate a Slashdot influx.

For whatever reason, the neuron cluster in my brain where I store my mental perception of Apple is also used to store my mental perception of Sony. When I see commercials for Apple products, I regularly either verbally say that it's a Sony (such as "That's the new tiny Sony mp3 player" when referring to a recent Nano commercial), or I at least think the same in my brain. The reason, I think, is that Apple is a better Sony than Sony is - When I was young lad, Sony represented technologically innovative, stylish, high quality products. Apple of course followed in Sony's footsteps, so much so that it Out-Sony'd Sony.

So I beseech Steve Jobs and Howard Stringer - please merge to save me the confusion. Thanks.

Microsoft tries, and fails, to recruit open-source guru. In reply, Eric Raymond ridicules the offer: "I've in fact been something pretty close to your company's worst nightmare since about 1997." [Computerworld News]

How utterly juvenile. 

Eric S. Raymond still seems to live in a world where he believes himself to be much more important than actual reality would imply. Microsoft's worst nightmare? With all due respect to Mr. Raymond, himself and Mr. Stallman have probably been the two greatest impediments to the adoption of Linux, putting a quack, cult-of-personality face on what is otherwise a technological tour de force (it is remarkable how much more earthed and pragmatic Mr. Torvalds is about the OS in contrast). I have never met Eric personally, but I always got the impression that he was terribly overrated (I read the Cathedral and the Bazaar and found it trite and unpersuasive).

I could just imagine some random Microsoft recruiter doing blog searches and noting some ESR guy, and offering him a probing offer, only to get this sort of nonsense in reply. It's very Junior High-esque.

[UPDATE: I haven't been following Slashdot as much as I used to, but this was discussed there. One of the comments linked to a hilarious graphic as well]

Today's hike was at Rattlesnake Point, a great little conservation area, again featuring the Niagara Escarpment. Rattlesnake Point is located in the Halton Region Conservation Area , just North of Dundas on Appleby Line, North of Burlington, and has trails that attach it to the Bruce Trail (and to other conservation areas). You can see the satellite map here. If you're driving North on Appleby to get there you'll be treated to one of the most interesting roads in the flatlands of the GTA (it's very Italy like, with too narrow of a road twisting and curving at amazing gradations).

The ropes you see there are evidence of the rock climbers who scale this face, one of the few natural opportunities to do so in this region.  A couple more pictures from today's outing can be found here. This area is a great little day outing, and is absolutely beautiful as fall rolls around.