On Oct 20, 2004, at 4:20 PM, argus@dds.nl wrote:

I would like to use svg in my wiki for musical notes and animated dance routines. I have seen that there where some tests on Mediawiki (Brion, I think you experimented with it), but it doesn't look like it went into production already. What's the current status?

1.4 in CVS has some limited support for rasterizing uploaded SVG images to PNG via an external renderer (Batik, Sodipodi, Inkscape, or ImageMagick). It hasn't been thoroughly tested, but seems ok. It will probably need some checks on processor usage (eg sensible maximum sizes) and I'll want to make sure that there's not some major security problem (like being able to read local files referenced from the SVG).

I've played a bit with options for using the SVG images inline with the <object> tag, with disappointing results: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-October/025778.html Basically, SVG plugin support isn't very reliable (no transparency in any browser tested, and printing support is hit-and-miss) and the fallback to the rasterized version is sometimes either naggy (Mozilla) or completely broken (Safari).

Obviously rasterized PNGs won't replicate animated things very well. Additionally, iirc SVG animation is achieved by using JavaScript, which is another security angle that needs to be checked.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)