[Zope] Announce: Where's the zope? => SVG

[Jason Cunliffe]

>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