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I'd like to publicly congratulate those involved in the development of SVG and its implementations. I have been working with computer graphics for over 25 years and split an immense amount of blood on the floor at midnight. With SVG I can now do almost anything I want [except for 3D - in which I also have a molecular interest]. And I suspect that I can stick with it for the foreseeable future. In the distant past when XML-DEV was worrying about whether XML was going to succeed there was talk of needing a "killer app". I (think) I said that SVG was going to be that killer app. It certainly was the single most important thing that would show Jane Webpage and Joe Hacker that XML was more than HTML. We even had a thread "XML *should* be boring" - on the lines that XML was primarily a syntax for doing worthy things server-side. And a lot of XML devotees were proposing that XML's role was primarily to support middleware and that XML-over-the-wire had little role. But the slogan "save 30% of middleware costs with XML", though probably true, does not excite most of the people I interact with. XML-O-T-W has really come to pass with SVG. It has an immediate WOW! impact. Even for me - who was expecting it - it makes me go WOW! And it will do wonders for those others who wish to develop technical information objects over the wire. It is a wonderful collaborator with CML. Much chemistry is graphical and we have the same dichotomy as MathML between presentational and semantic chemistry. Only where maths has to use its own language, we can use SVG for the presentational chemistry. I am particularly appreciative that SVG has been designed to allow roundtripping - i.e. conversion to graphics need have no information loss. I'm excited about access to the DOM - I need to see how I can merge a ChemDOM into and SVG DOM - and I'd be delighted to meet those at XTech2000 who can help. Henry, I, and the CML-DEV irregulars have been hacking a few examples of chemistry in SVG. Early days. But we would be delighted to share these as OpenData with anyone who has SVG - or XML - tools that they want demo material for. Chemistry is fun, appeals to many people, and has a substantial informatics industry, who need SVG/CML. I'll have demo stuff at XTech2000. All we ask is that our authorship is retained. [help with tools would be appreciated!] Finally I;d like to pay tribute to the W3C process in the case of SVG. I agree that the W3C process leaves things to be desired [I am moderatorially neutral] , but I think that SVG should be counted a considerable success. When the activity started there were several submissions and I was worried that either they would go nowhere or that there would be fissions. In practice the members have produced a high-quality spec, with very exciting early proof-of-concept from several members (and non-members). We can reasonably see SVG being transparently incorporated into the browsers and becoming part of web life. At that stage many of the Web folk will have to learn XML to be able to use SVG to its full extent. P. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/threads.html ***************************************************************************
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