Not to mention that extremely cool work being done in gill, the Gnome illustration program (not even alpha, but you should see the demos). Looks like SVG will be a very wide-spread format in Gnome apps. And Macromedia is a really bad company - I suffered for many years with Director. They bought Flash, BTW - it wasn't developed by Macromedia. Of course, SVG is not supported in ANY of today's browsers.
Thanks. I will check out 'gill'.. Yes indeed. There are many Lingo(Director) programmers who dspote Director's own power and virtues, are now disenchanted by MM and would like to see a _viable_ openSource cross_platform replacement. When MM bought Flash it was called futureSplash. To their credit Falsh has been greatly improved since that first download. FLash can be embedded very nicely into Director applications including Shockwave. Flash4 can also be embedded into Apple's Quicktime 4 which in turn can be now embedded in Adobe's new version PDF..[I have not personally tested this last option yet]. There is work being done on Java SVG player. I think this runs now - but will check and confirm. Wither way, it appears that very soon we will see players and broswer compatible solutions. The neglect of vector graphics by the web browser developers has to be one of the great mysteries of web development history. It is riduculous to take structured data and reduce to banwidth_heavy raster graphics which have 0 semantics. Duh. But finally peipke seem to be waking up. on erason is becaeu they can see for themselves the efficiency of FLash. But also the frustrations of a super fast format like that which does not possess universally accessible object semantics... Enter SVG, gil, XML-??? My main point of these posts is that comprehensive XML-based multimedia would be a very powerful and wonderful thing. And Zope[+Python] should be a brilliant component of that. One application I have stongly in mind is for 'smart-maps': animated hyperlinked maps - WEBGIS/WEBCAD/WEBWHITEBOARD Does anyone remember the original NCSA 'XCollage' ??. http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/vis/color/sites.html The beauty of an XML-based multimedia system with a Zope object system is that, for example, all the 'web map objects' of a distributed webGIS can be represented by DTML Methods and sets of these which pass messages to each other and thereby modify attributes, state etc. If you look at the scale, scope and complexity of WebGIS it is crying out for such an approach. The mechanisms in Zope whereby hierarchy and acquisition are bi-directional, allowing context to affect behavior is perfect for implementing an open multimedia webGIS. This is a killer app IMO, but requires significant elements to be in place. I detect all the ingredients now, but there is work to be done before we can have dinner! If anyone here considers this thread is off-topic, but is intersested to discuss privately in more detail then please contact me. - Jason ------------------------------------------------- Jason Cunliffe <jasonic@nomadicsltd.com> NOMADICS.STUDIO(Design Director) Geo-Digital Arts and Technology Le Vieux Moulin, Route de Mons 83440 SEILLANS, FRANCE Tel: +33 (0)4 94.76.98.72 Fax: +33 (0)4 94.76.97.77