I first heard about the SVG group here. And decided I should go for sure, as I've not been involved with SVG for a while now but am still a large supporter. The group was a interesting mix, but still mainly acdemia and developers. Theres was one guy called Paul who was a designer/artist who I had a good chat with afterwards. I recomended reading Harry and Dave's Dissertations as there right up his street. I also suggested to Jan-Klaas of vectoreal who was showing encrypted content inside SVG. He should consider looking at XML Encryption standard because a killer application would beable to pass a SVG around to anyone with encrypted content. Then for different groups to beable decrypt different parts of the same SVG. Think of it like the Rubik's Magic Rings where with the correct process you can get a different model/picture that others. I remember it took me hours to work out how to get a 3D construction. Anyway, it was a shame Mark Birbeck from x-port.net did not attend because I was interested in seeing formsplayer 2 working. Pn the plus side, I think SVGOpen 2005 is looking and sounding great. Plus its only in the netherlands so I'm thinking it would make a nice holiday as Sarahs never been to the netherlands and I have not been for 5 years now. The prices also seem very reasonable for a 4 day conference and if I do decide to submit a paper (which I am considering) its even cheaper. Thinking of doing my idea about dynamicly changing content based on external feeds. Think 10×10 and your close.
Some thoughts afterwards. Most of the Vodafone live phones come with SVG as standard now. Just because SVG is XML, doesnt mean you shouldnt forgot the metadata. Adobe Illustrator CS has support for Adobe's XMP metadata, but even putting in rdf dublin core is a good idea. Worth reading – From hypertext to Datument.
At long last there is stable support for native SVG in Mozilla, so its really starting to happen. And talking about Mozilla…
I need to check out XUL and XBL. I remember looking at XUL along time ago when Mozilla was still in point release. Now it seems pretty darn good and easy to write. I see it as a useful way to combine different webservices into an application. For example I could use the del.icio.us api with cocoon server to pass data back and forth into the XUL interface and on to other apps. The example I saw on Friday took content from a xml file processed it and transformed it into a svg all inside the XUL interface. Ok and another thing I learned about. XBL – A way to bind xml languages together. Its like using CSS almost in XHTML but actually does away with complex namespaces issues? But XBL raises many questions. Whats the difference between XBL and namespaces in the practical sense? and whats sXBL?