On Thursday, February 6, 2003, at 04:24  AM, Holden Glova wrote:
<SNIP>
>>
>> ....then, the other day I read something about how KDE and GNOME are 
>> now
>> using SVG to produce their icons - the advantage being that they can 
>> make
>> their icons any size (scalable)... and of course that got me to 
>> looking a
>> bit at SVG.  So would it be possible to create SVG-based GUIs that 
>> 'run'
>> in a browser and have this SVG-based toolkit as one of Ruby's 
>> built-in GUI
>> toolkits?  Would this be a coup for Ruby in the web-space? (could
>> this sort of thing be considered a 'killer app' for Ruby? - I truely 
>> don't
>> know, I'm looking for opinions.  I kind of think it would be very
>> powerful, but I don't have enough in-depth knowledge about SVG yet to
>> know for sure).
>>
>> Phil
>
> Hiya Phil,
>
> This came up on -talk a bit longer then a year ago - back then this 
> link was
> pasted by someone which has some very nice 'ooo ahhh' stuff
> http://www.kevlindev.com/gui/index.htm
>
> AFAIK, for an SVG gui to be useful it would need to handle events. 
> This means
> you either need to run it inside a mozilla browser with SVG support 
> compiled
> in or you use the adobe plugin (which means you use javascript) or you 
> would
> need something else that could render the SVG (something like Batik). 
> The
> adobe plugin hasn't been updated in a very long time which makes me 
> wonder if
> Adobe is still keen on this. Sadly, what is supported in the Adobe 
> plugin is
> different then what will work in Mozilla or IE. Life on the bleeding 
> edge is
> full of compromise :)

Phil et al,

I agree with your assessment that it would be a killer Ruby application 
to be able to create browser delivered interfaces using a vector based 
renderer (rather than HTML).  For the reasons outlined above I don't 
think that SVG is up to it...but Macromedia Flash _IS_ up to it.  So, 
after getting FreeRIDE to the next level, I plan on continuing my 
efforts to build a complete Flash generator for Ruby (pure Ruby).  THAT 
will differentiate Ruby from PHP or anything else.

Anyone want to participate?

-rich