codedread

Hallvord R.M. Steen (an Opera employee and member of the HTML WG) was kind enough to create a bug regarding an issue I had raised a few months back. It is currently not possible inside an embedded SVG to determine the parameters sent in from HTML:object if the two documents are on different domains. This appears to be a hole in the HTML4 spec, which doesn’t really address cross-domain security concerns for the HTML:object element. Click To Read More...

Shelley has a good long read about web standards, Silverlight, etc. I haven’t yet installed Silverlight (I’m on Linux most of the time) so I can’t even look at the effect everyone’s getting all gooey about over at the Hard Rock Cafe site. Maybe one day I’ll get around to it. Unless it’s truly 3D effect, I have a hard time believing that the effect can’t be done using SVG and SMIL and made to work in 3 of the 4 major browsers today. And this with standards that have been around for more than half a decade. So there. Nyah.

Speaking of plugins, I’ve been watching this guy continue to improve his SVG viewer (a SWF file that runs in Adobe’s Flash player) with about an update per week. Interesting idea (which has been pursued before incidentally). I’ll be really impressed if he can get the thing to a point where SMIL and scripting can be implemented.

Still, nothing beats some type of native support. In the meantime, I’d even accept ‘native’ plugin support from the big stick-in-the-muds. I still haven’t ruled out the idea that one day in the future, the Silverlight or Flash plugins might suddenly be able to render SVG directly, with no translation step in between. Here’s hoping for Flash 11 and Silverlight 3… Why not? They both already support a scripting engine, interactivity, XML parsing, animation, vector graphics, gradients, etc. Hm, why not, indeed.

Renesis 1.2 was supposed to be released on or about yesterday. Maybe it will come today? It would be a good little birthday present. Seven of Nine bugs marked as Fixed in 1.2 are mine, so I’ve been looking forward to it for about a month. Who knows, I might be able to recommend it one day as a viable replacement for the Adobe SVG Viewer.

One reason I think Web Applications (as opposed to the now watered-down term of Rich Internet Applications) are great for users and developers, is because they do not need to be installed directly on the user’s computer. This is one thing I think Adobe has misunderstood about the ‘RIA’ revolution with AIR. Click To Read More...

I had an epiphany of sorts this morning when discussing something with a colleague. Mind you, my day job now revolves around SVG so I am definitely biased but: If you wanted to create a vector image that is displayable on a variety of platforms and products, the only format that makes sense these days is SVG. It IS the interoperable choice for vector graphics. We have a lot of things to thank for this:

• Wikipedia’s adoption of SVG as preferred image format
• Browser take-up of native rendering: Opera, Webkit, Firefox
• Platforms like Qt and Gnome continuously improving support for SVG
• Mobile industry take-up of SVG as the graphics format of choice (even mandated by 3GPP in Europe)
• Continuously improving tool support: Inkscape, NetBeans, Xara, Sketsa, GIMP, Ikivo
• Toolkit and CMS are now starting to take-up SVG: dojo and drupal
• Lots and lots of Free Clip Art (woops, the secret is out)

It’s definitely a different world than it was 3-4 years ago. I don’t think there’s anything stopping the SVG train. Based on this, I think Microsoft and renewed Adobe support of SVG is inevitable. It’s just sad that we’ll likely have to drag them kicking and screaming (and only after Silverlight gets decent penetration, probably).

I came across Laurent Grégoire’s CVS Quick Reference Card. I needed something quick and handy to put on my thumb drive, so I figured this would do. Only problem is that my Windows box only understood Adobe’s PDF format. I’ve grown to really dislike PDF, primarily for the fact that the Adobe Acrobat Reader takes forever to come up and has become bloated. Since I have Adobe Acrobat Professional Version 8.0.0 installed here, I thought I’d see what formats I could convert the file into for doing some minor edits to the file Click To Read More...

Apparently this month is my month for slacking off in compelling blog content, so continuing in that vein here’s a nice little screencap I took while getting Adobe Reader 8 “rammed” to me (I’m nicking this phrase from Rob). In fairness, installation took “only” about 10 minutes, but that initial figure and progress bar did hang there for several of those minutes, inciting my rage and the pressing of Alt+PrintScreen. 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM. Thankfully, since that time I’ve got a new laptop that can handle these modern, bloated document readers…