codedread

Poo. Declarative animation in SVG won’t make it for the Firefox 3.1 release. That’s a big shame, though I trust that it’s the right decision.

I’ve been watching David’s FakeSmile script evolve over the course of the last few months. At the same time, I have been reading up on SMIL Timesheets, a recent specification drafted by the SYMM Working Group. With recent support of timesheets in FakeSmile, I thought it would be a good chance to experiment. Click To Read More...

Chris Double was kind enough to update the SMIL patch on Bug 21642 for Mozilla and then do some builds for me so I wouldn’t have to muddle through the build and patch process. I’m ashamed to admit that so far this has been enough of a deterrant that I haven’t bothered to try it out, so I’m really glad Chris did this. The best part is that, in doing this, Chris found Firefox crashing on several tests and was able to update the patch to fix these problems.

Anyway, with the patch, a Mozilla trunk nightly gains about 4.5% to their overall SVG score. Put another way, they score 25/116 on the SVG+SMIL animation tests in the Full test suite. While this isn’t in the league of current WebKit nightlies (and neither of these platforms are in the league of Opera 9+), it does show that progress could be made on this were it applied to the trunk (once Firefox 3 ships, of course). Does anyone know if this patch means that a Firefox build would pass those SVG+SMIL tests in Acid 3?

[Update: Chris has made the Firefox builds available for download here]

[Update 2008-04-20: Chris’ latest build now makes the SMIL score 38/125, though some tests have now regressed.]

I haven’t really given a good ‘SVG News Digest’ in well over a year, but there was enough recent news that I thought I should post a little bit about what’s going on in the Scalable Vector Graphics world. Fair warning: This blog post is long, I probably should have spread it over 4-5 days worth of blogging, but I lose patience when queuing up posts… Click To Read More...

The latest WebKit nightly now has a decent amount of SVG+SMIL (animation) coverage. By my old school grading system, that gives WebKit a solid ‘B’ grade in terms of SVG support (75%). This is what I was talking about a few weeks ago and I’m quite happy to see it happen! If they cleaned up their regressions from a few weeks ago (some problems with SVG patterns, I believe), they might even crest 80%.

After the announcement that the Apple developers have turned on their SMIL support in order to pass Acid3 test, I was excited enough to download the MacOS nightly and run through the SVG animation test suite. I was pretty disappointed. Click To Read More...

WebKit and Opera are really scrambling to be the first browser to fully pass Acid 3. First, Opera claimed they were at 100/100 in a private build, then Ian corrected the test (based on feedback from Apple developers), presumably knocking Opera back to 99/100. And just now, the WebKit guys have turned on SVG Animation (SMIL) in their nightly builds, putting them also at 99/100. This was a surprise to me, since I had heard that their SMIL implementation was not ready for prime-time, so to speak. Oh well, this is great - now we have a second browser implementing SMIL natively and we can truly start pushing for interoperable solutions.

What does it mean for Apple and Opera fans? Probably a lot. What does it mean for web standardistas? Apple and Opera care (more?). What does this all actually mean for web developers at the moment? Not a single thing. Oh well, time to tally up my own similarly-meaningless SVG support score…

[Update 10:25 PM CST: Apple did it. They are the first to achieve 100/100 in Acid3 with a publicly downloadable browser (even if it is only for MacOS)]