Sam Arthur Allen

From Svg wiki

I used to use SWF (Note: not Flash, but SWF) immensely, but now I have chosen to develop for SVG. I am not interested in it taking over SWF, but I will be more than pleased to see it as a viable alternative.

The reason?

SWF isn't as free as people think. In SVG, we can embed any video format we want to, granted that the end-user SVG viewer is capable of playing it. In SWF, you have to use the video formats they choose, otherwise it's a breach of using their specification. Also, SWF is in binary formats, where SVG is published in plain text XML.

"Well that's no problem," some of you SWF fanatics may say. "PHP and the like can publish SWF files, so who needs to edit text files anyway."

Not exactly. There's a critical point here.

Whenever there's an interesting website, we might right-click the page and "View Source..." to see the wonderful underlying HTML and CSS at work, and learn from it. If webpages came to us as compiled binary data, they might be smaller, but it would be extremely difficult to learn from them; no plain text source to read.

SVG on the otherhand, is plain text, so we can learn from any example we see on the internet. SWF, is not. Once it's compiled from Flash (or any similar IDE), we would need a reverse engineer of one sort or another to understand it. And don't tell me that you can view and understand the SWF by using a hex viewer or through a disassembler, it's not compiled in assembly language either.

Oh yes, and I also program in GNU C, PHP and MySQL, and use SVG wherever I can on the site I am working on at http://www.atshop3d.com/

--Sam