SVG Open 2005

Hauser & Wenz :: Blog

Wednesday, August 17. 2005

Posted by Christian in ** English

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After Zurich, Vancouver, and Tokio, the fourth SVG Open, SVG Open 2005, is currently taking place in Enschede (The Netherlands). I will have to depart quite early tomorrow, so here is already my personal roundup of the events here.
Monday's tutorial on scripting SVG went fine, Tobias was quite happy with it. On Tuesday, we attended (among other things) the obligatory "SVG Wow!" session, as always fun, entertaining and enlightning. The following presentation titled "The Story of Art" was a bit strange, but showed in which unusual places SVG is used nowadays. The rest of the day was more spent with listening for strange sounds in our mobile hard disk, but during that, we also saw some quite intersting talks. We did not attend the ice-breaking session but were lured into a very fine restaurant, but according to some of the other attendees, the night did not end too soon (three words: university campus bars).

On Tuesday, I attended the double keynote where I especially liked Kurt Cagle's The Future of SVG and the Web. I would accept his bet that Microsoft will incorporate SVG in IE in 2008 (I personally doubt it, but time will tell) and that plugins have to go (since plugins could ensure a consistency of the way things are displayed in different browsers, but again: time will tell). However a really nice keynote, and the other attendees seemed to like it as well.
I then chaired one of the morning sessions and therefore saw a very nice presentation by Andrew Main on PenDraw, a program that compiles a special programming language into SVG. Then, Jan-Klaas Kollhof spoke about SVG 1.2 Networking. He mentioned that he was a big hung-over, but nevertheless delivered an interesting presentation. Finally, Musbah Sagar presented an advanced mouse event model, trying to solve one of the most common implementation problems today.
After a lunch break, Tobias and I spoke on "SVG and XAML" and try to present our take on these technologies, as unbiased as possible, as cynical as required. I think it went really well, also Kurt (who mentioned XAML a couple of times in his keynote) paid us a compliment. Thanks!

We quickly changed rooms to watch a presentation about SVG2MHP, where SVG content is converted into some application that is delivered as part of digital TV. They did not have a settop box, but at least an emulator.

Then, Tim Rowley spoke about the past and the future of the SVG implementation that will be enabled by default in Firefox 1.1. Very amazing war stories and yet again the proof that an SVG viewer is something non-trivial to write.
So far from Enschede. Again a nice conference and it is amazing to watch how SVG grows, slowly, but steady. Looking forward to next year's SVG Open. Oh, talking about SVG Open 2006: It will take place in beautiful Victoria, BC, with Kurt Cagle as the chair. This year's PHP West (on security) already brought me to the Vancouver area, and I really liked it there. I hope more details on that will be posted soon on the SVG Open homepage.

Update: Kurt's keynote was slashdotted.