[sword-devel] SVG module (an idea)

[Greg Hellings]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:43 PM, David <davidslists at gmx.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 21, 2010 01:50:11 pm Peter von Kaehne wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I just saw this here in Wikimedia commons:
>>
>> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Ampel.svg
>>
>> It is an svg file which has java script integrated.
>
> You could potentially do this with HTML5 and not have to use SVG which
> would require fewer additions to front ends to support, as they would just
> have to update their HTML rendering engines to support 5, instead of
> adding svg parsing and rendering.

BibleTime generally tracks the latest releases of Qt, which includes
QtWebKit.  I don't know how much lag there is between WebKit main and
QtWebKit, but I can't imagine it not supporting SVG images - since Qt
supports them quite well.  BibleTime uses SVGs in several places
already IIRC.

In general SVG is supported wider and more standardly than HTML5.  I'm
fairly sure that Cairo (GTK stack) supports it.  Qt supports it.
WebKit supports it.  Almost certain Gecko/Firefox supports it.  That
means it's likely already supported in BibleTime and Xiphos (if built
with Xulrunner).  I think BPBible uses wxHTML which is rather pathetic
- so I doubt it has support.  But wxWidgets might have SVG support
outside of the HTML widget.  I'm certain Java has support for SVG
images, even if the Java HTML widget does not.

Due to the fact that SVG has been in the wild for almost 10 years,
you're likely to find that SVG support is much stronger than HTML5
support which has not finished its draft revision process yet.  So
you're more likely to get SVG support in front ends than HTML5
support.  In fact you'll find that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics#SVG_and_Microsoft_Internet_Explorer
IE alone among the "major browsers" does not support SVG - there are
even JavaScript libraries that support and render SVG images.

--Greg