codedread

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.

I took 20 minutes and added a feature request to my SVG Web Stats web application tonight: Now you can switch the timeline graph from Traffic mode to Distribution mode, which shows the share of each browser on my site as a percentage of the total. 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.

From a discussion that started with bitterness and vitriol and half-flames came forth a semi-useful discussion in which I was a mere observer. To me, the pinnacle of usefulness came with Henri Sivonen’s post which contained a list of use cases. Here was an important one 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).

WTF. Microsoft actually listened to feedback. Internet Explorer 8 will interpret web content in its “best standards” mode by default. Here’s the press release. Thank you!

Good way to garner some praise just before MIX08. Now we wait with baited breath for later this week, when news from MIX08 about IE8’s support of other standards (beyond CSS2’s Acid) will percolate up into the blogosphere.

Lots of continued discussion about Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s support of web standards. Sam Ruby continues to finesse his SVG-via-Silverlight solution (improvement: use createElement() and then some XSLT to transform from SVG’s XML elements to XAML’s). Shelley Powers continues to finesse her ultimatum (ultimatae?) to Microsoft. I thought I’d post a few loose predictions of what I think IE8 will have when released. Click To Read More...