The Ashes

Cool things are finally happening with SVG these days. It’s showing up natively in browsers (including Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and more). It’s natively supported on the iPhone, and work is happening in various open source communities to create options for Internet Explorer. Google uses it under the covers in Google Maps (to create vector line drawings showing where to go); Google Docs (for drawing into presentations); and more. Wikipedia, one of the top web sites on the Internet, has a huge repository of SVG images, while many tools such as Inkscape, Illustrator, and Visio can either export to SVG or work with it natively. Vector graphics support through SVG and Canvas is consistently one of the top voted requests by developers.

Since more and more is happening with SVG these days, we thought it would be great to host the SVG Open 2009 conference this fall in Mountain View at the Google campus from October 2-4, 2009. The theme this year is “SVG coming of age”.

We are looking for contributors to present papers or teach courses. Presenters are asked to submit an extended abstract in English with an approximate length of 400 to 800 words by May 15 to http://www.svgopen.org/. The abstracts are reviewed by a reviewing committee and presenters will be informed about acceptance on or before June 26. If your abstract is accepted, you will be asked to submit your full paper by August 31, according to instructions that will be sent to you.

I’d love to see presentations from the Ajax community combining SVG with JavaScript in various creative ways. Come and join us in the fall at SVG Open!