Diaries

Since Opera released version 8.01, the first minor revision to version 8, of their browser a few days ago, I thought I would go ahead and walk it through the SVG Tiny 1.1 test suite. The results are pretty good, of all the 79 tests:

• 3 tests had a FAIL result (3.80%):
  • linking-a-04-t: there is no traversing the hyperlink by clicking on the anchor.
  • linking-uri-03-t: there is no traversing the hyperlink by clicking on the anchor.
  • struct-cond-02-t: shows danish text on my US language system.
• 2 tests had a PARTIAL result (2.53%):
  • animate-elem-20-t: the text grows for a very short time as either rectanges are clicked to launch the fading animations.
  • text-fonts-02-t: "blue is bolder" is rendered with a light weight as "blue is lighter" is rendered with a bold weight, which should be the other way around.
• 74 tests had a OK result (93.67%)

There results are only my own results and are not officially sentenced in any way by the W3C.

Thanks to Dean's advanced computer hacking skills, SVG.org news and diaries are now indexed by Technorati, hopefully raising the readership for the site. Thanks Dean!

Jon Udell published an introduction to E4X a while back. I've already been very interested in E4X, and I truly believe that this technology fills a gap that hasn't been really catered for so far: simply querying XML. The DOM XPath APIs are pretty heavy to work with and DOM Core isn't truly designed to be used as a query language. I think Jon Udell has is spot on when concluding to his article when he says that the idea is to provide an 80/20 solution that does what most people need in a way that most people can easily understand. I think these APIs are particularly useful in a world where web developers are relying more and more on mechanisms such as XmlHttpRequest and getURL(), and I really can't wait to see SVG and CDF implementations to offer E4X to developers.

Dave Elis has created a Simpsons Quiz using SVG. Combining these two awesome things obviously resulted in an insane little game. Looks like the game uses getURL() method calls to do discrete data refresh and check on answers. The design could have used a little polish, but the overall execution is really great. Well done Dave!

And now, a little self-promotion! I have just turned the switch on the Fuchsia Design website. It is pretty simple, with only one page giving the lowdown about what I do and some of the companies I do it for. I'm using some SVG to have little transitions and interactivity using SMIL-based features, as well as an SVG font to ensure my text looks good.

Thanks to the good SVG news from Google, I find things about SVG I probably wouldn't have heard of otherwise. This week, I fell on this ColdFusion Developer's Journal article about creating an SVG-powered dynamic gantt chart written with ColdFusion MX. That's right, a Macromedia ColdFusion app! It's good to see SVG reaching people in a technology demographic that's heavily exposed to the not-quite-pro-SVG Macromedia view of the world. In his article, Simon Horwith makes the crucial point that any XML-ready platform is fit to get going with SVG, and ColdFusion like every single server-side environment out there offers tools to work with XML. It's good to be reminded of SVG's versatility and how easy it is for developers to get started with it, whatever their environment is.

Doug recently asked me on the SVG IRC channel about my experience with Adobe SVG Viewer and Apple's browser Safari. I briefly told him that everything was basically working just fine. In this diary entry, which I'll update if need be, I intend to list all that I have found out in using the Adobe SVG Viewer and Safari together.

Today Dean Jackson decided to start syndicating SVG.org news on the W3C SVG public page, using one of the many feeds available for syndication. This is the second site that I know is syndicating news from here, the other one being Planet XMLHack. Just like them, anyone can syndicate any SVG.org contents for publication on their website or aggregation in their newsreader.

I've just been alerted of the existence of a news clip on the BBC News website shot during the recent W3C 10 bash in Boston. If you look carefully, youi'll see Dean Jackson, editor of SVG 1.2.

Bruno Rodrigues from Vodafone has a pretty interesting blog site. Lately, Bruno has been writing about his early experience as an SVG content author. His last entry has a few bits about what you can or cannot do when authoring mobile SVG content.

While at the first CDF meeting last week, I met Kevin Kelly from IBM. Kevin is an XForms Working Group member. I was curious about the press release I saw a while back announcing IBM and Novell teaming up to bring XForms natively to the Mozilla platform. According to Kevin, IBM and Novell are on pretty fast track, and are hoping for a stablilized codebase as early as early spring next year. This will allow for XForms to be treated, like other technologies such as XHTML, CSS, XUL or, in a more restricted manner, SVG, as a first-class citizen markup-wise.

Here are some information about the SVG.org server setup, just so this is recorded somewhere before I have time to create a more general information page about the site.

If, as a registered user, you go into your Display Preferences, you will now be able to choose what colour you want the site to be displayed in. Right now there are only two themes in there, the default green one and the pink one (you've been warned). but I may add more as time goes by...

For those of you who were in Tokyo for SVG.Open 2004 (more on the conference soon in another entry), the new svg.org website is supposed to answer one of the gripes I expressed during my Learning from Flash and its Community session there. Here are some things you might want to know about the site.

My favorite editor, SubEthaEdit, did not provide a way to have all the different document windows stacked onto one another (at least none that I could tell of). So it sprang my first foray into AppleScript.