xmlhack: Comparing SVG with Flash

Andreas Neumann has drawn up a table giving a feature-for-feature comparison between SVG and Macromedia's Flash technology.

Neumann posted his table to the svg-developers mailing list, drawing comments from list members, and also news of other such comparisons.

Jean Haney pointed to Square One's visual comparison between SVG, CGM and Flash.

BitFlash have also made available a table showing demos and comparisons of support for SVG in mobile devices.

In other SVG news, a new build of SVG-enabled Mozilla is available from Alex Fritze. Fritze has a Windows snapshot available for download, with MathML and SVG support.

Good comparison. Technologically SVG is much more advanced and it's much more convinient for web-developers. But it's not ready yet from business prospective. Let's wait a couple of years (I wish it happen sooner) until more SVG authoring tools will come to the market, Mozilla will enable SVG by default (not as a special build) and AOL will abandon Flash-bound IE in a favor of Netscape/Mozilla. Unfortunately until then - SVG is a science experiment, not a technology adopted by business.

I thought the graphics tool companies had agreed to eventually adapt their tools to create for svg or smil or whatever.

But the comparison in plug-in size waves like a huge red flag in Neumann's document.

Plugin-Size: Flash: small, about 200k SVG: large, about. 3 MB

Isn't there any possibility of the creators of SVG maybe putting some sort of priority list together, or developing a mini-svg player that has some chance of being downloaded? Or is there some other way to approach this.

Eric

That's certainly a neat comparison, very clear.

I agreed Robert that "Comparing SVG with SWF format" would be a better title.

On the other hand, is all features listed for SWF format already implemented? If it is, despite SVG are more features rich, the current SWF implementation (ie Flash) is probably much more powerful than all SVG implementation.

Also, if it is, then the version of SWF format, which the article's author written about, probably only a part of the full plan (the real full SWF format specification only known by Marcomedia). Maybe that "full plan" have more powerful than SVG?

Anyone know the truth?

In spite of what table shows, Flash can do much more than that.

i.e.: Flash can flip, Flash can have groups made, etc...

By the way, not only Flash exports to SWF format, livemotion and PHP. So... I agree with previous comment.

Future of SVG is not as clear as we'd like. Macromedia's Flash has much more penetration than SVG format and that's a very important thing to take look of.

the title "Comparing SVG with Flash" is somewhat misleading......it would be more accurate to have the article labeled:

"Comparing SVG with SWF format"

Flash is a tool (application)

SWF is a format

All in all nice work....I think SVG (an XML application) has a bright future.....maybe someday Macromedia's Flash tool will import and export SVG format :-)

We all learn by sharing what we know Robert A. DiBlasi