[OpenLayers-Users] SVG Support in OpenLayers (Tiling)?

[Andreas Hocevar]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Ivo Brodien <philotas at cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 1) Can I make OpenLayers request SVG as the format against a WMS?

No, because there is no default way of representing vector features in
SVG. And every vector layer that OpenLayers can handle consists of
features (i.e. geometries + attributes).

> 2) What does the SVG Render exactly do? I heard it is only used in
> Firefox, but it is not used for the map data?

The renderer draws features, i.e. it uses the geometries (repesented
as OpenLayers.Geometry) that are stored as feature property.

And since there are browsers that do not support SVG, there are also
VML and Canvas renderers available.

So if you really need vector data, I would recommend to use WFS
instead of WMS as backend (in the case of navigation, a GeoRSS would
probably make sense as format if you want to update tracks
incrementally). Otherwise I would suggest using WMS with image/gif or
image/png8 as format, which is usually less data and faster.

BTW, OpenGeo is currently working on an OpenLayers based blogging
application for the iphone, which takes advantage of some of the
none-mouse events provided by the iphone. See
http://svn.opengeo.org/mobile/IOL/trunk/, example usage is shown here:
http://svn.opengeo.org/mobile/demos/OL-investigation/iol.html. This is
really new, whit will write a blog post about it later today
(http://docs.opengeo.org/geospiel/). Feel free to contact him directly
if you want to know more.

Regards,
Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Hocevar
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/
Expert service straight from the developers.