If you happen to work in the Financial Services industry and haven’t checked out the 3rd Annual XML for Financial Services conference, I’d humbly suggest that you may want to check it out. It will be held January 26-28, 2004, in New York City. And if you happen to actually attend the conference, then hopefully you will also sign up for the following Post Conference workshop:
Creating Data Driven Graphics with SVG
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a World Wide Web Consortium language specification that describes two-dimensional graphics in XML, and is a natural language for creating data driven graphics like Pie Chart, Bar and Line Graphs. This session will give a brief introduction of the SVG syntax, and will then dive directly into how to efficiently translate your XML data into graphics. The secret to minimizing development time is to create reusable SVG components that utilize intermediate, custom namespaces. The custom namespaces are used to represent the different graphic components (i.e. Bar Graph, Pie Chart), and only the custom namespaces are translated to SVG. The result is that you will only have to translate your XML (like XBRL) into a simple meta-language, and not the more complex SVG. The examples in this session will use XBRL, which will be converted via XSLT to the applicable custom namespace, and JavaScript will be used to convert the custom namespace into the final, interactive SVG.
I was thrilled to be asked to do this presentation, and with 2 hours, I’ll have plenty of time to do some in depth SVG examples. It should be a blast.