codedread

Can a WordPress plugin be written that would sanitize the HTML in my blog comments through this thing? kthxbye

Rather than twittering these and missing a sizable chunk of people who might be interested, I thought I’d post a couple quick links to very cool news in the SVG world: Click To Read More...

Alp Toker, one of those graphics heavy hitters, has woken up to give us a nice summary about the ’skia’ graphics library which Google uses for the Chrome browser. I like that it has animation and SVG awareness ‘out of the box’, but it probably won’t be a major player until it’s fully ported to all the major desktop platforms and has matured a little.

Don’t ask me how I found this: The book based on the movie based on the musical inspired by another musical based on the novel.

This shake-your-head moment brought to you by Amazon. Now I’m just going to sit over there and wait for those checks to roll in…

Have a good weekend!

Things I Learned:

• They borrowed some UI concepts from Opera and IE (controls and address bar inside the tabs, speed dial, paste-and-go) but I think they’ve done some things better. For instance: the default home page requires zero user interaction, the status bar is only present when you hover over a link, tab cycling makes sense and requires zero thought.
• They really didn’t want to introduce another rendering engine for developers - so Google is simply using WebKit, it won’t be a fork
• No tie-ins to Google Services installed by default
• They’ve been working on it for two years
• V8 will eventually make its way into Android
• They haven’t made very many contributions to Webkit, but are fully committed to doing so. Their plan is to build Chrome off the WebKit tip
• Extensibility - though they obviously support traditional browser plugins and they have plans for a richer extension API - it won’t be in the Beta.
• UA String is: “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″ =>Google, please work to shorten the UA string, not lengthen it (is there really any valid reason for “Safari/…” to be there?)
• The browser is fast. Transition is seemless. I like that the default home page requires no user interaction to generate. Ctrl+L, Ctrl+K, Alt+D, Ctrl+T all work as I expected.
• They are using an older version of WebKit (older than Safari 3.1 it looks like) as there are two SVG-related rendering problems with my site that I thought were long gone
• They have a sense of humour (open up the Chrome Task manager and see the link at the bottom)

Further Exploration:

1. I’m curious how browsers like IE and Chrome are ensuring that access to the browser cache is shared efficiently across all processes?
2. I’d like to learn more about the ‘cross-platform’ graphics library that they are using, does it support hardware acceleration?
3. Are other browser vendors worried that the editor of the HTML5 spec is now an employee of a browser vendor?
4. What are Google Chrome’s plans for feeds? At the moment, there isn’t even any auto-discovery

Google is going to release a new open-source web browser tomorrow (Sept 2nd, 2008) called Google Chrome. Lots of information contained in forty pages of this comic book. The rendering engine is WebKit, but it has its own JavaScript engine (V8) that compiles the JS into bytemachine code and uses more efficient garbage collection. It also follows the thoughts of the Internet Explorer team of putting the tab at the root of the UI and letting each tab be its own process (not just thread). Oh, it comes with Google Gears pre-installed too.

This all sounds good: security, stability, anti-phishing, sandboxing, ’superfast’ JS. Of course there’s only one true test though.

At first I was wondering if this was a fork of WebKit, but I think the only thing that would make sense would be for Google to work in parallel with WebKit (continually updating Chrome’s rendering engine with new versions of WebKit). Everything else would be part of the Chrome open source project. If you’re in the know, drop a line below.

Ok, I’m happy. A completely open source browser that supports SVG and is (sort of) co-sponsored by two big companies with lots of cash (Google and Apple).

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)?