Apple Embracing SVG?

March 6th, 2008

A hopeful piece of news from yesterday was about the possibility that Apple will be using SVG for the iPhone rather than Flash.

The advantages? SVG is lightweight, SVG is standard, SVG scales beautifully, SVG doesn't have to be licensed, and Safari already implements much of the SVG 1.1 specification. Not to mention there's a version of SVG coming out just tailored for mobile devices.

Other talk based on Apple's rejection of Flash for the iPhone is that Steve Jobs will use Silverlight, instead. I have to assume there's a lot of drinking going on at these conferences.

Comments
1
Jeff Schiller - 9:56 am March 6, 2008

Another possibility.

2
Shelley - 2:25 pm March 6, 2008

Could be, but SVG actually makes sense. SVG and Apple's own Quicktime.

3
Charles - 3:08 pm March 6, 2008

People keep wanting to run Flash on the iPhone, but that's the last thing you need. Once you open to Flash, you get all sorts of idiots trying to cram high bandwidth junk down the little pipe. If you're going to implement features that depend on video or vector graphics, you're going to do an optimized site for the iPhone anyway, so you might as well use the iPhone native Webkit and QuickTime features already implemented (like SVG). Most sites that use Flash are using it to do stuff that other system software does better (like FLV vs. QuickTime in H.264). Some of the iPhone optimized sites are beautiful and efficient even on desktop displays. Like Leaflets.

Oh, and BTW, why would anyone even listen to Scoble anymore?

4
Shelley - 4:21 pm March 6, 2008

Yes, it makes more sense that this was based on technology already on hand, and which is more conducive to mobile browsing. Leaflets is a nice site. A good demonstration of creating mobile content.

5
Jeff Schiller - 8:17 pm March 7, 2008

Via this link, the iPhone OS 2.0 (due in June) will feature "Support for SVG (scalable vector graphics 1.1.): a resolution-independent image format that is highly compressible"

Sounds great! :)

6
Shelley - 5:48 pm March 8, 2008

It is great, and makes a lot of sense, too. I could see all the mobile devices supporting SVG for the same reason. Heck, it works for the bigger devices, too.

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the discussion. Comments are now closed, but you can contact the author of the post directly.

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