Web Solutions for Mechanical Engineering

This web site wants to assist you in common engineering tasks and provides you with information about web-standards, modern software technology and applications. Currently the main focus lies on the web's upcoming graphics standard SVG.

SVG @ MecXpert

W3C - home of the SVG standard

SVG overview page: This is W3C's official Scalable Vector Graphics site.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification: W3C Candidate Recommendation 2. August 2000
SVG mailing list archive: always worth a look.
SVG Conformance Test Suite: SVG Test Suite, developed by the SVG Working Group.

examples for engineers - SVG makes the web attractive for them

Integration by Parts: XSLT, XLink & SVG: Great article by Didier Martin, where he shows mechanical engineers, how to build an interactive illustrated parts catalog.
usByte.com: Very illustrative demonstration of PC technology via animations.
SVG Aided Mechanism Design

applications - there is an increasing number of SVG aware products

Adobe's SVG zone: Adobe is an active member of the SVG working group. They offer a COM-control / Plugin to use in today's common browsers for free.
Adobe's Illustrator: Vector graphics creation software for the web, with SVG export.
Mayura Draw: A lightweight, exciting productive shareware tool for generating vector drawings. Offers SVG export.
Jasc Trajectory Pro: A vector graphics editor based completely on SVG. Free preview version.
MecChart: A new SVG based charting solution here at MecXpert. To use it you must have Adobe's SVG control installed.
Bitmap to SVG Converter by Koichi Mori: Impressive and usefull.
Others: A lot more can be found here.

code snippets - to view these you should have Adobe's SVG control installed.

Inverse Transformation - SVG & MathML inline with Html in IE (5.5 and above): With the free MathPlayer (download here first) we can comfortable combine the Web Standards Html, Svg and MathML. Based on IE's Behaviors technology MathML markup can be embedded in Html as well as Svg with Adobe's SvgViewer. Here is an example.
SVG inside .NET: Use Adobe's SVG control from within .NET WinForms.
Speaking SVG: The combination of SVG and spoken text is fascinating.
The SVG Agent: This is a variation of the Text-To-Speech/SVG example.
The Beauty of Fractals: Fractals are beautiful and looking at the elegant way they can be created with SVG they become even more beautiful.
Talking SVG documents: Multiple SVG documents on a HTML page sometimes need to send events to each other.
SVG <title> as tooltip: SVG Processors are not required to implement <title> elements as tooltips.
Controlling rendering order: SVG uses an implicite drawing order of elements, so it's a bit tricky to change that order.
SVG graph: Drawing a graph into a cartesian viewport.
SVG grips: Manipulating geometry via SVG handles.
Simple SVG slider: Engineers need to manually control technical parameters.
Object oriented SVG scripting: With currently used HTML web pages it is not possible to mix in XML or SVG code. So you have to reference an external svg file. To achieve this with Adobe' svg control, we use the embed or object html element.
Since it is not uncommon to use svg-side scripting as well as html-side scripting, we need to call functions across html/svg boundaries. There are different ways to do so. I show you a simple object based solution to that problem. It works due to the fact, that the browser's window object is visible to both sides.
So have a look at the modified Lissajou example - some of you might have come across my original version at Adobe's example site.
DOM tree output: When manipulating a XML DOM tree programmatically, it would help a lot to be able to get a snapshot of the current DOM tree.
DOM2 events with SVG: There are currently not many examples for the new DOM2 events.
SVG metric transformations: Mechanical engineers often need shape preserving transformations.

tutorials - more and more requests for that

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification: There are many examples inside. You can look at them - offline - and learn a lot.
SVG Conformance Test Suite: Not really a tutorial, but usefull to get deep insights.
Adobe's SVG tutorial: Start here.
Code Snippets at MecXpert: Have a look.
The MapTools Company: Modified examples from the Adobe tutorial.
Iguana Studios: SVG tutorial based on developer's experiments.
Kevin Lindsey: SVG tutorial and examples of simulation and interactivity.

mailing lists - have a look

SVG mail archive at W3C: Information related to SVG 1.0 Specification.
SVG at eGroups: Increasingly busy. You have to become a member.
SVG at Adobe: SVG component related discusson forum. You have to become a member.

links - there is an increasing number of links available

<?xmlhack?>: Very well maintained common SVG site.
SVG at SUN: Java tools, solutions and papers.
SVG at about.com: A lot of informative links.
SVG art by Tobias Reif: SVG examples, source code, information, and related links
XMLization of Graphics by Pankaj Kamthan: Read it.
SVG cartography site in German: A Discussion of different vector-based graphics formats.