Next Generation Mobile SVG for Everyone

A little over a month ago the SVG Tiny 1.2 specification became a Candidate Recommendation, one of the final stage of development of a W3C specification where the technical work is expected to be frozen and mostly complete and implementors are requested to send their implementations in order to check the technical validity of it all. As the press release states, SVG Tiny 1.2 is well on track to be adopted across Mobile Industry bodies such as OMA, 3GPP and OMTP. Also, for the last 18 months, all interested parties in the industry, such as carriers and terminal manufacturers, have all been evaluating how best to use SVGT 1.2 in their products. However, when it comes to smaller organizations such as mid-size content providers and small mobile design studios and application development houses, SVGT 1.2 has been locked away.

Even though SVGT 1.2 is a royalty-free and open standard, most of the actors in the mobile field implementing it are private companies building closed source software, such as BitFlash, Ikivo and Opera. As a matter of fact, open source is not such a common ticket on mobile devices as it is on desktop computers today, and besides a couple of Linux-powered devices from Motorola and Nokia and the WebKit-based S60 browser, mobile phone software is virtually always closed-source. Further than that, the vast majority of mobile phones are based on completely closed platforms (RTOS) that prevent developers and third parties to developer native software, and J2ME is usually the only option, apart from S60. So, in my experience, most developers and content creators out there wanting to give new mobile technology a shot use S60 devices with beta software.

This approach is available for SVGT 1.2 today, but only to people who have the necessary structures to enter in agreements with BitFlash or Ikivo. This means that your organization has to have an interesting profile for them to justify the resources providing support to you while you evaluate the product, as well as having the right legal people in-house to enter such agreements. Basically, if you're just some guy out there with an idea and a will to experiment, you're likely to be on your own.

I fully understand why BitFlash or Ikivo choose to work that way though. The main reason I believe is that they need to control who gets to run their code in order to manage expectations and make sure no one jumps to the wrong conclusions with regards to their SVGT 1.2 implementation. Indeed, SVGT 1.2 has been so far in heavy development, and implementations of it were constantly being improved and changed to match the latest changes in the specification. Just releasing this stuff into the wild could have had very negative impact to the untrained eye where people could have just lynched precious work for some odd incompatibility with the unstable specification.

Now that SVGT 1.2 has entered Candidate Recommendation, and can thus be considered stable, it is time for all this to change. SVG Tiny 1.2 has an incredible feature set, and very big improvements over SVGT 1.1, much, much bigger than a 0.1 version number jump would suggest. The most obvious features are scripting with ECMAScript, audio and video support, fully synchronized with SVG animations, wrapped text within rectangles, gradient fills, transparency, etc. This new feature set is a big deal and opens up the door to a wide array of new usage for SVG on mobile devices and everyone out there should be able to try it out.

Flash Lite 2 and SVG Tiny 1.2 can easily be considered as tie-breakers on a feature-per-feature basis. The downside of Flash Lite 2 is a general lack of support from mobile industry bodies, no integration with J2ME and, so far, an insufficient backing from manufacturers. But if there is one place where Flash Lite 2 fares better currently is that an SDK for it is readily available to everyone who wants to experience that technology today. I really think BitFlash, Ikivo and any other fine purveyor of Mobile SVG software need to make a move now so that SVGT 1.2 fully has the shot it deserves to be the number one rich media technology on mobile phones in 2007 and beyond. Content Development Kits, or CDKs, should be made available to small-size content and application developers with a simple EULA and software for Windows (supplementary platforms would be even better) and S60. As for providing support for these CDKs, I think we can anticipate strong communities to emerge as soon as these CDKs become available and limit the efforts needed to get successful programs running.

Technology speaking, SVG Tiny 1.2 goes a long way towards what next-generation mobile services providers need, and the ball today is in the court of companies such as BitFlash, Ikivo, Opera and others to bridge the technology gap and provide evaluation players to hungry developers.