codedread

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...

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.

Looks like WordPress 2.6 is out. I submitted three patches about three months ago: 6583, 6602 and 6642. I’d like to sturdy up WordPress’s ability to handle invalid XHTML markup. Care to take a whack at my XHTML Piñata? This all sounds vaguely familiar.

Anyway does anyone have any suggestions on how to get these patches moving? Someone I need to email? kthxbai

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.