Diaries (page 2)

Opera becoming (even) more developer friendly

Posted by stelt apropos on Wed Nov 15th, 2006 at 19:55:20 BST

As Opera is pretty darn good at supporting standards that already makes it rather developer friendly. However some extra tools to help the developer in creating content is very useful as you can see by the popularity of Firefox's DOM inspector, FireBug and Web Developer extensions. Opera understands that and is putting some more power in the hands of content developers with the new dev.opera.com community, where i also found tools

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dev.opera.com: "Playing SVG Darts: Target Practice"

Posted by stelt apropos on Sun Nov 12th, 2006 at 01:42:34 BST

Playing SVG Darts: Target Practice is my first article on the new dev.opera.com. If you didn't already, install Opera, and go check out the site

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there's no such thing as invalid SVG

Posted by stelt apropos on Tue Oct 17th, 2006 at 11:54:13 BST

It's either SVG, perfectly valid by the spec (and increasingly working across the growing range of SVG viewers because of it) or text, XML maybe, that just happens to look a lot like SVG (and is guessed into an image by some viewers). right?
Therefore a whole lot of SVG out there doesn't deserve that title, often because of very few stupid little things. These stupid little things break things, sometimes directly, sometimes eventually later as the ingredient of some workflow.
To help in fixing this i've written a bunch of e-mails to W3C, OpenClipArt and others, Wiki entries, pieces of PHP script and entries on my SVG links page all for improving SVG validation.
It seems W3C and others can use a hand on this matter, see what you can do, working from this W3C wiki entry on SVG validation

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my svglogo.com contest entries

Posted by stelt apropos on Wed Oct 4th, 2006 at 15:51:06 BST

I've sent in a couple of SVG files, but all are variations of this basic logo idea:

(capture in animated gif)
As you might see it's similar to the SVG Open 2005 logo, which is a plus for recognisability. It is however not the same for a few reasons. The Open logo had the idea of showing "fun" for the "S", "science" for the "V" and "art" for the "G". For the logo contest i wanted to do more of a show-off of things SVG can do (incl. animation), plus remove some details that were not my work .
One very strong constraint is that it should render fine (recognizable, readable and preferably pretty) even at only 15 pixels high. Therefore the basic shapes had to be simple, it's supposed to be a logo after all, not Some Van Gogh.
As i'm more of a coder than a clicker, i used quite a bit of mathematics PHP coding, to get things the same height, angle, time.
Statically the picture is the same in several viewers. Dynamic features (some even non-Tiny) find support in some viewers and degrade gracefully in others.
Though the picture didn't change, i did clean up the code a bit after the last version i did submit (I might do more of that and show all the color, size and flavours of SVG variations). Also i created this logo generating form in the process

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some loose SVG thoughts

Posted by stelt apropos on Mon Sep 25th, 2006 at 14:11:42 BST

mostly uncrystallized:
-SVG Firefox extensions (Holger's a nice start, looking forward to more, hoping to get my SVG+Javascript coding helping bits into one)
-thinking about a programmer-friendly wysiwyg+code SVG tool (just move, resize and eventually everything related like viewBox, stroke-width, font-size, transform, etc) would be totally awesome as a framework to build on towards a complete programmer-friendly design tool (Inkscape's really nice, if the resulting image is a static endgoal)
-I should look into the Virtual Mechanics' Web Engine design tool that has Opera in it (i'm still 99% handcoding, even for my svglogo.com entries)
-The Wiki (http://wiki.svg.org ) needs love and attention. how do we ask and persuade people to help?
-Saturday was first meet of national 'action on open' kind of platform that i got invited for, lots of connections there, thinking about how to spread SVG and other open (web)standards through it.
-ASV End-Of-Life, can we build plug-ins or something close to it from Batik or AmanithVG (maybe letting IE hand .svg files/URIs (preferable image/svg+xml though) to Squiggle, or other implementation strategies (plus maybe postpone the EOL?).

Just to free my brain of this 'storm' :-) , comments very welcome though

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ease Javascript(+SVG) debugging, show of your way

Posted by stelt apropos on Fri Jul 7th, 2006 at 09:54:50 BST

In addition to my previous bit, here's some more about what is (too) difficult (for the non-expert) about coding SVG: (debugging) Javascript. Please send feedback on how you do it, preferably with screenshots or screencasts even. There's lots of little bits out there, but nothing that feels like a complete toolset that covers most of your needs, or is there? (and many of the Javascript tools expect an HTML environment for the JavaScript to live in.)

What i've found so far: cross-viewer getURL, authoring guidelines, Known bugs in viewers. If a start_off_with_this_file.svg is built that uses the jslint extern mymethod notation and all sorts of explanations or the URLs of where to find it within comments, it could help prevent mistakes.

But there will always be bugs left, so we also need real debugging tools. What i've found so far, that needs further investigation: Debugging SVG with Visual Studio (WinXP+IE+ASV), FireBug Javascript debugger(Firefox), and Batik' s show debug traces

A reaction would be very much appreciated

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SVG Webdeveloper extension or shiny donkey ?

Posted by stelt apropos on Sat May 6th, 2006 at 10:25:19 BST

As with any technology, developing SVG content can too easily go wrong on little things in multiple places. I believe it's a small number of exactly those little things that many people creating their (first) pieces of SVG keep encountering. Though there are lots of helpful bits in tools and documentation around they are too scattered for especially the novice SVG developer. Therefore i think it would be incredibly useful if, just as the widely popular Web Developer extension for HTML, CSS, etc., a SVG Developers Firefox extension would come into existance. There's already the nice SVG Switcher extension that allows you to choose between 2 renderers. But what about the following functionality? Check MIME. Validate SVG. Check browsers compatibility. Advice workarounds for bugs. WebStart Batik. save raster. detect common coding errors. specialized search. links to spec(s), svg.org, wiki and svg.startpagina.nl. Maybe cooperate with Chris Pederick of the award-winning Web Developer extension? If you're the one to start this off, ask for the shiny donkey on #svg for some help

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quick starter links on SVG, update

Posted by stelt apropos on Mon Feb 13th, 2006 at 03:55:26 BST

To spread SVG even more, through showing how broad the use is plus giving some easy introduction, is what i started svg.pagina.nl for.
I just gave it a big update. Go see it at it's new address svg.startpagina.nl, please promote it and send in links that i really should add.

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Inkscape offers "create instant coloring book" drawing

Posted by stelt apropos on Wed Feb 1st, 2006 at 00:00:04 BST

Always looking for a way to promote SVG i went through the *.pagina.nl stats and saw kleurplaat.pagina.nl is very popular. So i put forward a request to Inkscape and not much later i was happy to find a new feature called outline mode. So when visiting young kids give them a book of nice SVG drawings, blog about how you did it and send the parents the URL.

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My SVG bits collected (focusing)

Posted by stelt apropos on Mon Oct 24th, 2005 at 02:34:33 BST

To focus, to think about and do more than 'just' SVG (after a long time of trying to tell as many people as possible about SVG), i collected every (?) little one of my SVG bits. And at least i can find them quicker myself, when i start making everything valid and working in every browser (this of course comes with validity pretty soon, right?)

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finding inaccurate remarks on SVG and responding

Posted by stelt apropos on Sun Sep 25th, 2005 at 19:57:02 BST

Next to the earlier mentioned Google News on SVG i now also check blogs through Technorati on SVG and Google Blog Search on SVG.

In between all the new places mentioned where SVG is being used, there's also lots of inaccuracies found. "SVG is Dead" of course got my reaction.
Dennis Forbes, who by the way likes SVG, was happy with my feedback and put the little "SVG is Dead"-thread on-line.

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SVG Open 2005 blogging and photos

Posted by stelt apropos on Sun Sep 25th, 2005 at 19:09:42 BST

Lot's are mentioned on the SVG Open 2005 website, but here are some that aren't yet:

Jan-Klaas Kollhof: photo-report
Cameron McCormack: arrival, day1, day2, day3, day4.
I don't know who: arrival, day 1, afterthoughts, photos from Craig N.

Read on for the full story and comments... (99 words in story)

SVG for Joe Average, easing the first step

Posted by stelt apropos on Sat Aug 13th, 2005 at 15:28:23 BST

Scalable Vector Graphics is becoming increasingly popular. Google returns more than 7 million hits on "SVG" of which the first 100 only nr.13, 31, 61, 78 and 89 are not about the graphics format. Everybody (sometimes sort of) knows HTML, SVG can be just like that. But we need action on easing the first step...

Read on for the full story and comments... (286 words in story)

Shaky Video Glance

Posted by stelt apropos on Tue Jul 5th, 2005 at 00:04:28 BST

For those who manage to always make mistakes in reading the easiest maps or directions, or are nervous about it, here's "from Enschede trainstation to SVG Open 2005 venue, the movie" :-)

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SVG on TV, the commercial is running

Posted by stelt apropos on Tue Jun 21st, 2005 at 18:51:53 BST

In my earlier entry SVG (open) commercial ? make a scene ! i played with the idea of putting SVG on TV, in public places.
I have recently made a finished version of the SVG Open commercial i'm happy with, that is now running at the entrance of the computer science building.
Feel free to use it too.

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