Comments on: Why Adobe chose FXG over SVG

By: Chuck

Chuck — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:54:17 +0000

I’m not a developer, but instead a client who hires developers. So my perspective might be different, less technical and even irrelevant to those reading this blog, but I’ll take a moment and make a case nonetheless. For the past several months, my contract developer team has been creating a custom Flash-based editor using TLF. The “simple goal” was to have a WYSIWYG editor that reads / writes xHTML 1.0 strict with tables and absolute positioning. Who would have thought in a million years that would be comparative in difficulty to a lunar landing? Yes, we now have one of the first Flash-based editors that successfully perform those goals. But it was time-consuming, expensive and far more difficult than it should be. Why? Because Adobe had either the ignorance or arrogance to decide TLF didn’t need to support xHTML and tables although it would have been a relatively easy to include. When you read the TLF forum, these glaring omissions are constantly requested, yet Adobe’s official reply is “we have no immediate plans to add those features”. Translation? The input from Adobe’s community of developers is meaningless even if the requests are universally voiced. To me, that’s incredible and the decision to use FXG instead of enhancing SVG is just another example of how they refuse accommodate the development community’s wishes. Adobe virtually owns SVG, the Flash player and the graphic design software industry. No one has the level of holistic control they enjoy. So please don’t tell me Adobe felt “limited” by SVG and had to create a new format. They can do anything they want and they consistently prove such in the negative.

By: nwebb » Flash vs HTML5 - and a few points for HTML5 advocates to consider :)

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:26:26 +0000

[...] to the conventions as they could but felt unable to go 100% with SVG. You can read all about it here. Standards take time to agree upon and still not everyone will agree – I’ve already seen [...]

By: Noj

Noj — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:30:04 +0000

I was in the same ship as SVG but then I
had a look at catalyst and FXG and then understood why fxg was a much better and superior format. I hope adobe goes further and makes fxg a standard for flash graphics. In addition adobe is a design product giant, they did really need a way to standardize a graphics interchange format between their products, svg couldn’t do that without too much hacking.

By: Adobe Replaces SVG with FXG | Enetlive.net- Rich Internet Applications Blog

Adobe Replaces SVG with FXG | Enetlive.net- Rich Internet Applications Blog — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:47:05 +0000

[...] Blog Posts: Mike Chamber Blog Post – Why Adobe Chose FXG Over SVG [...]

By: Flex Monkey Patches » Blog Archive » Rubbernecker’s Review - Week 15

Flex Monkey Patches » Blog Archive » Rubbernecker’s Review - Week 15 — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:31:58 +0000

[...] Why Adobe chose FXG over SVG (from Mike Chambers) [...]

By: todd

todd — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:42:06 +0000

I’m not too worried about Adobe not supporting SVG. I’m sure there will be tools or some third-party API that might help convert such to FXG. People have been doing this for Silverlight. I guess I’m more interested on what SVG can do that FXG cannot.

By: Frank Spangenberg

Frank Spangenberg — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:06:44 +0000

I totally agree with Dan Martin, it’s like every Adobe developer group is creating their own file formats for interchange between application A and B, B and A, C and A, C and B etc. At the end we’ll have 10 apps and 100 file formats. Somebody totally misunderstood the approach of STANDARDS!

And if FXG is so close to SVG, why don’t you just improve SVG? Because you’re loosing the USP? “You” are looking at SVG like if it’s a fixed non-changeable standard…

And what’s the difference between a “non-standard implementation of SVG” and a not standardized FXG?

By: Tek

Tek — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:35:13 +0000

It’s too bad that we could not use SVG for Flash graphics and searchable content, but I find hundred times worst not to have a standard way to use FXG (or SVG) from the HTML page to use it at runtime in Flash.

We really need to execute FXG from the HTML page, it would allow to create full readable content for “Search Engines” and text readers. And it would help to silence a little those who tell you all the day long that Javascript is much easy to integrate and deploy than Flash for UI Design. It could be our better argument against nowadays Javascript conquerors (the best would be to have Actionscript evaluation … but we couldn’t for the moment).

I’ve started to develop something that read custom XML block from HTML with ExternalInterface but it is not HTML valid if I remember. The only standard way to read FXG from HTML is to write XML content inside the OBJECT tag. But its content couldn’t be read from Javascript nor ExternalInterface so.

Could it be possible to change the Flash Player to initialize it with FXG tags coming from the tag ? Would it be in any Adobe plan to parse FXG at runtime and to do so ?

By: Dan Martin

Dan Martin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:11:32 +0000

I work with Adobe products for a living, and am probably the prime audience for Thermo — I spend about 50% of my time developing prototypes in Flex. So, I find this discussion interesting, but I’m not as willing to give it a free pass as the previous commenters.

I guess I have to ask, since Adobe was involved in the creation of SVG and participates in its maintenance, why cant’ these limitation be addressed there?

Secondly, the SVG spec does have extensibility support with a mind towards including viable extensions in future specs: http://wiki.svg.org/SVG_Extensions

I find Mark Ander’s explanation to be fairly unconvincing. It kind of reads like someone who wants to make a new spec. For instance, he says “Flex doesn’t provide a DOM of the MXML document so there’s no way to look up an object with a specific ID”. Maybe I’m crazy, but I’m pretty sure there are multiple ways to lookup an object by ID in Flex(MyMXML.myPropery, MyMXML["myProperty"]), so I guess I just don’t get it. On most of his other points, I believe SVG extensions could likely address the issue.

I find the whole topic of Adobe and open formats rather frustrating.

By: isriya

isriya — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:36:01 +0000

Mike,

any idea about next speaking tour in Thailand/Southeast Asia?