Hooray! I’ve been approved to attend SVG Open this year. It looks like a very interesting conference. We are not currently doing anything with SVG (I’d be interested to hear from libraries who are), but are very interested by many of the possibilities that it offers. We currently have an image navigator/page-turning site, but there isn’t a great deal of interactivity that can be accomplished without using a plugin of some sort (though I wonder about AJAX now that Google is doing so much with it).

We are thinking about adding these additional features as an optional bonus… users could still use the existing, more accessible, site or could choose the more interactive one (that would require a plugin — at least for the time being). We looked at the possibility of a Java applet, a Flash script, or something with SVG. SVG is the most appealing because it is XML and would fit with our current architecture (and because it is an open standard and not owned by any one company (as a side note: it will be interesting to see what happens with Adobe now that they own Flash and the leading SVG plugin)).

SVG, not currently supported natively in browsers (though Opera and Firefox/Mozilla have committed to building in native support), has seen a lot of growth lately in the cell phone market (and in bleeding edge desktops, like Gnome, which support SVG for images/icons). There are also new SVG plugins waiting in the wings to be announced (supposedly at the SVG Open conference). Still, SVG is far from a widely implemented technology.

What we would like from it is some sort of traditional page turning animation where turning the pages results in a page curl. That is not the key feature though. Being able to select regions of interest dynamically (instead of relying on predefined tiles) and being able to zoom in an out more fluidly would be nice (we can do this with our own interface now, but not so interactively as we would like). I think going to the conference will be a fact finding mission. Does SVG do what we think it can? Who is doing interesting work with SVG (from which we might be able to benefit).

There are some digital libraries out there doing interesting work with Flash and Java applets, but having everything in XML is just too convenient (and future proof(?)) What we really need, though, is for a tool to support loading JPEG2000 images into an SVG document (Batik currently doesn’t do this). We’re thinking about getting rid of our archival TIFF images (and just keeping a backed-up JP2 image); it would also be nice to not have to go from JP2 to JPEG to SVG (going, instead, just from JP2 to SVG). I don’t know… I’m surfing the Web trying to learn more about this. I expect the conference will also be of great benefit.