Most people haven't quite realised yet, but SVG is here. It's not something cool in the distant future (that's SVG 1.2), it's something cool today. I just got the information that in June 2002 the Adobe viewer plugin alone had 77% market penetration (by comparison, Flash MX had 53%). It is now circa five and ten percent higher. On top of this, Microsoft is shipping Office 11 Visio with SVG support.
It looks like it won't be long before we can seriously start wiping off Flash...
Re:Say what?
darobin on 2002-12-15T17:27:32
No, this is actual. The fact is, people often have the SVG viewer but are totally unaware of it. Both Flash and SVG have been measured in the same fashion, according to the actual capacity of a group of people to see content they were presented with.
When I arrived at this job in August (having been employed in good part for my SVG skills), there was a meeting at which I was asked how soon I thought SVG would have widely available usability. I didn't have the numbers back then, but I nevertheless answered "very soon". And to drive my point home, I added "in fact, I'm pretty certain that every end-user win32 box in this office has SVG support". Everyone thought I was kidding, several told me they were certain they didn't have an SVG viewer. We checked, I was right
:) The reason for this is simple: Adobe's SVG viewer ships with Acrobat Reader 5.0 (as well as with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). So apart from unixy boxen (which I hope will get better support next year), there's a high chance that you've installed acrobat and have the SVG viewer handy, without ever knowing it.
Thanks to Acrobat, the spread of the plugin has been almost viral. Due to a poor mistake, the viewer wasn't included in the installer for 5.1, but that's just a minor pause on the road and it'll be back with the next version.
Re:Say what?
darobin on 2002-12-16T11:36:38
Here is some extra information on the topic:
Through Acrobat alone, ASV currently reaches about 11 million new desktops per month. The data (...) does not include ASV distributed with:o Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and other non-Acrobat products (Adobe and others including JASC).o ASV distributed with books like 'SVG in 24 Hours' which include a CD with ASV.o ASV downloads from www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html or any of the sites that host downloads of ASV in violation of Adobe's EULA and distribution agreements.It also doesn't take into account distribution of other viewers (such as Corel's) that are also bundled with other products. It doesn't cover distribution through OEMs either.
