codedread

Imagine for a moment:

1. Joe User knows nothing about the SVG format other than it’s an image format.
2. Starts a new document in Inkscape
3. Imports a raster image (PNG) from the hard drive
4. Saves image as SVG
5. Uploads the SVG file to a clip art website
6. Is baffled why the image displays fine on his computer in the browser but is blank for everyone else

Yes this could really happen. So how do we fix it?

• Warn during Import stage of local references?
• Warn during Save stage of local references?
• Embed raster as a data: url in the SVG source (breaking link with local file)?

I’d like to apologize to all of the browser viewers out there who have been swallowing my uncompressed pages all this time. I just turned on the gzip option under Options > Reading in the WordPress admin panel. I also tidied up my css and the HTML markup generated by my PHP. That’s always fun…

I received a copy of Shelley Powers‘ new book, Painting the Web about a month ago. Sadly I was pretty busy with work and other projects so I wasn’t able to devour it as quickly as I’d hoped - though I did take a moment to squee over the fact that my SVG Support page is in the book. Ok, this review might be biased Click To Read More...

Why don’t Comp.Sci professors give out extra credit to students who submit patches to open source projects? I’m sure profs could come up with some scoring system based on the complexity of the patch and the amount of effort involved (size of code base, subject matter, etc). This would get the student out of pure theoretical assignments and give them real-world experience with software problems. About the only challenge I see with this idea is that a student may get 90% of the way through working on a patch and someone else (outside the school) comes in and scoops them. For this, a prof could still give some points for ‘trying’ if there was proof of the work.

I recently tried to compile Daniel Holbert’s SMIL patches in mozilla-central. While doing this, I observed the “configure” was core dumping. The folks in the #developers channel over on irc.mozilla.org were able to help me out and trace it down to the fact that Ubuntu’s dash was crashing. I worked around this by changing Mozilla’s configure script to use #!/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/sh.

Apparently this crash has been fixed on Ubuntu 8.10 because Daniel himself hasn’t witnessed this crash?

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...

Anyone have any idea why I’m suddenly seeing a large number of hits using a browser with the following UA string:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)

Only happened in the last few days too. Weird.