I’m either a work-a-holic or a huge nerd, but I spent part of today working with svg graphics for my project at work and I found a couple of resources that might be useful to anyone who is working with svg graphics and Flash. One of them is a paper comparing the .swf format to the .svg format – http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/comparison_flash_svg/. It seems to be a very in depth comparison. Another is a very old article about vector graphics at O’Reilly – http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/05/24/swf_not_flash.html.

I really like the SVG format, I think the idea of being able to code vector based graphics using an xml-type language is really cool, but as far as how the various vector based formats fit into Flex, there really isn’t any comparison to swf. It’s smaller, the plug-in penetration is higher, and within Flex I can dynamically load swf files (no such luck with .svg). I think svg is great for open source projects, but if you have access to Flash, swf is great.

One thing I’m very curious about is how the merger between Adobe and Macromedia will affect svg development. As far as I can tell, the main svg viewer plug-in is by Adobe (although Mozilla is working on native svg support for Mozilla). Adobe even has an SVG page set up for developers. I think there is room for both, so hopefully the merger won’t do anything to affect Adobe’s support for SVG.

Edit: Here’s another neat page with examples of different vector graphic formats http://www.square1.nl/TGC-SITE/vector/vector-gallery.htm