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Comment by eliaspro | Hacker News Reader

Things like this will just undermine the trust of regular users in open formats because "it doesn't work". And at this point it doesn't matter at all, who's to blame; a few years later the good ol' Adobe as we know it will sneak around the corner with a new proprietary format which is there to save the users from their horrible experience with this open crap.

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I think that this is a symptom of Adobe’s de facto monopoly position; if there was a viable competitor who could keep Adobe honest it would probably be different.

Remember that it was actually Microsoft who created and pushed for the RTF format as a common interoperability file format for word processing documents. This was way back when Microsoft and its Microsoft Word™ was the newcomer against the established giants in the field of word processing: Word Perfect, WordStar, etc. Of course, when Microsoft Word gained popularity (through no direct advantage of its own – it was using its coupling with Microsoft Windows, which the competition was wary of), then Microsoft lost all interest in RTF standardization.

Adobe just made snap.svg[1] last year. If they have a long-term plan to kill and supplant the format like you describe, then I guess somebody missed a memo.

[1] http://snapsvg.io/

Thanks for that link! This looks like a plausible middle ground between Inkscape and raw SVG.

2 years ago, and it's Dmitry Baranovsky's update to Raphäel.js rather than a big Adobe Project™ (which sacks off support for older browsers in favour of newer). And there's never been that much movement bar minor bugfixes for a long time. Not that there necessarily needs to be, it does what it does, but there doesn't seem to be any movement toward integrating closely with Adobe vector products (which would be useful) or seriously optimising (like, say, Greensock's really nice SVG animation stuff that's come out recently). Also IMO the two main competitors are better (SVG.js for simplicity & very nice plugins, Paper.js for complex stuff with amazing documentation). Note Paper.js is the successor to the Illustrator plugin Scriptographer, which was fantastic, but was killed by Adobe Illustrator updates - Adobe had something they could have used that worked really, really well, but didn't back it.

Snap is good, and useful, but it's not that useful, it's just a tiny library, and a bit of a wasted opportunity IMO. With fairly crap documentation beyond the basics. I would love it if there was movement on this, a better SVG workflow from Illustrator -> Web would make my life a lot less frustrating, but v0v it's Adobe and they either move at the speed of a geriatric snail or they stomp all over tools I find useful

I'm sorry, this just seems like paranoid fantasy.

Adobe has been pushing SVG and the tooling hard. Illustrator is great at SVG. If they want to kill it and replace it with a proprietary format, they're doing a fucking awful job.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [incompetence]."

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

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