Finished with my talk, finished with lunch, and I’m starting to return to
normal modes of operation. DonXML is giving a talk called Declarative UI
using SVG, which sounds pretty cool. He’s stated the problem as Creating UI Widgets
(menus, lists boxes, graphs, etc.) in a cross-platform way that are XML-based and
scriptable.
He looked at Internet Explorer’s element behaviors, Vector Markup Language, XUL, and
SVG. SVG# is an open source SVG package for
.NET. He’s showing a bunch of XML for a bargraph, embedded in an SVG document. Looks
pretty nice in the browser (he’s using the Adobe SVG viewer; works in IE, Netscape
4.7, sort-of-kind-of in Mozilla).
He mentions that the Longhorn UI is vector-based, and suggests that the Longhorn UI may be
similar to SVG. He also says that SVG maps very nicely to GDI+. A member of the
audience mentions that the GNOME UI supports SVG as well.