Programmer Musings

SVG Lives: the Widget Claim

This is the second in a series of posts refuting some recurring claims about the death of SVG, In the last post, Reports of SVG's death exaggerated, I gave a little history and refresher on SVG. This time I will try to tackle one of the claims about the death of SVG.

The Claim

SVG is useless because it doesn't have a widget toolkit for building GUIs

This argument seems to resurface every year or so. Invariably it is floated either by someone trying to build a website completely on SVG or by someone trying to compare SVG to a GUI-building technology (recently that has been Microsoft's XAML).

The argument normally starts by asking for a particular widget in SVG. A few people will show how they have constructed something, which leads to complaints about having to actually build what are obviously primitive tools. Next come the demands for a widget set in SVG. After several rounds of emails, the person decides that SVG is completely useless, because it doesn't even have radio buttons or a text-entry field.

The important point here is that SVG is a vector image format. It was never designed to replace GUI widgets. It is just an extremely powerful format for specifying 2D images. This claim makes as much sense as saying PNG will never amount to anything because it doesn't support scroll bars and drop down boxes. Obviously, no one would make this claim. But, this reason for claiming the death of SVG keeps recurring.

Amusingly enough, the KDE window manager for Linux uses SVG extensively for graphical elements in its user interface. One reason is because vector formats are very efficient for stylized images that may need to scale to multiple sizes. This describes many of the graphical elements that display on most desktops.

The fact that SVG does not have a built-in set of GUI widgets does not detract from its utility as a vector image format. As KDE has shown, SVG can be used to build parts of a graphical user interface. That is not because it has built-in support for GUI widgets. It is because SVG supports 2D graphics and many GUI elements are basically 2D graphics with behavior.

This claim is about SVG not having support for something it was not designed for. Obviously, this is not proof that the format is dead. SVG is alive and well.

Next time: The 3D Graphics Claim