codedread

So I finally crystallized all my new hard-won JavaScript, DOM and SVG knowledge into a simple proof-of-concept game. Any guesses on what game I implemented for my first go? One hint: It has to do with falling blocks… Click To Read More...

…well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

Anyway, I updated my website style a little. If you still see a blue background on http://www.codedread.com/, you need to refresh your stylesheet (shift-click on Reload/Refresh in most browsers). Hopefully it looks a little better. Still need to get the forums looking similar to the main site and this blog.

Well, I finished authoring my first SVG tutorial today called “SVG Kickstart”. You can read it here. It’s 5 fairly short pages, but hopefully it gives a good justification for the practical need for SVG on the web today. Future tutorials will likely delve into the more “flashy” effects one can get from SVG…

I mentioned before how I was cissifying my site. Well, I spent about an hour or so updating the rest of my site to be fully XHTML and CSS compliant by using the W3C validator tools (XHTML Validator and CSS Validator).

Sure, web standards are nice, but should it REALLY matter if I have a list element inside a paragraph element or if my form elements are not wrapped inside a paragraph? I guess my point is: after making sure that my site is compliant to the latest web standards out there, where are the fruits of my anal retentive labor? There’s not one user-discernable difference as far as I could tell.

On the other hand, after spending about 20 minutes debugging the way Opera was rendering my fancy new SVG buttons, I figured out why their browser was having a problem, patched my code and posted the bug in their forums. Now that’s what I call a worthwhile effort.

The Mozilla Foundation tracks its bugs via the Bugzilla tool (another Mozilla product). Over the time that I’ve spent using Firefox, I’ve opened a few bugs. I’ll list them here individually: 248350, 248352, 292498, 296266, 296399, 296462. Here’s a general query: here.

Most users probably don’t realize that anybody can open bugs in this fashion, track the progress of fixes and talk with developers in bug reports. Depending on the area under which your bug is found, you may see “instant” response (i.e. within a few minutes a developer may offer a fix) but for others response can be quite a bit longer. It all depends on priority, of course.

Anyway, all it takes is to sign up for a free account (available from the link above but if that link seems to hang you can just go go here). The only problem I see is that the Bugzilla database queries are too slow for mass consumption.

I spent some time over the last couple days updating my website in three ways:

1. Separation between content and presentation by using CSS. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s much more manageable. Minor tweaks to the UI to make it a little prettier.
2. Update site-wide all pages to better use PHP in a modular fashion. The user sees no benefit from this.
3. Added a SVG menu and masthead. To see the cool effects, you need an SVG-enabled browser like a Firefox nightly build (1.1 Alpha) or for Internet Explorer you can download the Adobe SVG plug-in (the most complete SVG implementation so far available). Opera supports SVG Tiny, but unfortunately it’s still a little buggy and feature-shy (moreso than even Mozilla’s implementation).