Here's a brief assortment of svg news from June. I don't think any of you missed that the final public version of Opera 9.5 was released, but if you did, nothing is stopping you from picking it up via bittorrent.
Jeff Schiller (Motorola) has been appointed co-Chair of the SVG Interest Group. The SVG IG is chartered to produce supplementary documents for the improvement, adoption, and evangelism of SVG; and to foster the engagement of the SVG community, both members and public, in W3C activities. Congratulations Jeff!
Opera Mini adds SVG support in their latest server upgrade. Great news for everyone that wants to efficiently use scalable web graphics anywhere.
One of the problems with the standards-based Web is that it's hard to use SVG's features to enhance HTML content. [...] So I've been experimenting with better ways to apply SVG effects to HTML content. The first step is to make SVG's 'clip-path', 'mask' and 'filter' properties work when applied to HTML content.
The above image should have been an svg image, since that makes it much smaller. However, it tended to freeze in Safari and Firefox, so I'll just link to it for now. Safari 3.1 has issues with the masking and sometimes the fill disappears for the tspans. Firefox 2 doesn't support masks, and has major issues with tspans. Firefox 3.0rc1 still has problems with tspans. Batik 1.7 renders it correctly, but doesn't run the animations (though possibly that's due to the FakeSMILe script). Opera 9.x should be able to play the animation just fine without FakeSMILe though, and you can click the image to stop the rotate animation should you get dizzy or something
I was trying out some various ways of creating a simple state machine illustration in SVG this weekend. Basically I'm looking for a fairly highlevel description language that allows me to make changes easily while still providing automated layout and a good aestetic result that can be exported to SVG.
The following example (from Wikipedia) shows a simplified example of what I'd like to get as the end result.
It seemed like Graphviz was a sure fit to those criteria. This is what the above graph would look like if written in the DOT language that graphviz groks:
As you see this is fairly easy to write, and super easy to change. Exactly what I wanted in other words. Here's the output file:
Now the end result isn't as nice as the first example, which was "hand-drawn" in Inkscape judging by the comments in the file. Which brings me to my question: is there a program that can process the DOT input to produce something more similar to the first picture?
Since ACID3 seems to be the talk of the town lately, I figured I should at least say something about it. First of all, it's been fun "racing" against Webkit. To me the real fun isn't until the final result can be seen in stable final products though, simply passing ACID3 by itself doesn't mean full support for SVG or any other web standard AFAIK. I don't think that was the case for ACID1 or ACID2 either. Though I would consider passing these tests as a sign of commitment to web standards.
Maciej Stachowiak wrote up a nice piece on the struggles to pass the ACID3 test. We too had to fix a number of things to get the test 79, submitted by Cameron McCormack, to work, though the other SVG tests were of course easy for us since Opera has supported most of SVG 1.1 since Opera 9, and SMIL Animation since Opera 8.5.
The tests I wrote for ACID3 are probably easier to pass than the test Cameron submitted, and I agree with Maciej that they are indeed not as stringent. It would have been possible to create a far more advanced SMIL test. Time was in short supply though, that's the only excuse for the somewhat simplistic SMIL test. Really I would have liked to have a few visual tests for SVG there instead, but the rules of the contest weren't such that it allowed that unless it had verifiable results using scripting. There could have been one or more tests for SVG filters for example. The SVG 1.1 testsuite has a number of tests for all of this though, so I would recommend using that to accurately judge how a particular implementation fares with regards to SVG.
...what’s really needed right now is exhaustive test suites for specifications– XHTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, you name it.
For SVG there are no less than two quite extensive public testsuites, one for SVG 1.1 and one for SVG 1.2 Tiny. These are still being actively worked on, with or without the help of ACID tests. The CDF WG also has a testsuite covering integration aspects of XHTML and SVG. Of course, exhaustive test suites take time to create, which is why the W3C is researching how to allow people to submit tests more easily. In general it seems the W3C is changing to become more open to the public, which IMHO is a good thing.
In closing, congrats to Webkit, and congrats to all the people involved at Opera for releasing a public Opera build that gets a pixel-perfect 100/100 pass rate on ACID3. Umm, what's that? An SVG-only Acid test? Naah, that's just preposterous.
Here's a collection of links I found interesting in the past few weeks. Now the only thing that makes me twitch is how planet.intertwingly.net strips out all the svg content from my feed while preserving the 'object' element fallback content. It looks absolutely bizarre. Anyway, enough with the whining and on with the news
The W3C Video on the Web Workshop delivered its report. I suppose there are more than a few things for people to be upset about there, but there is some sensible outcome as well. I'll get back to that in another post.
The Wikidraw project shows how SVG can be used for visualizing information from other sources in a mindmap-like fashion. Pretty cool, even though the server is a bit slow.
Smashing Magazine highlights some of the best tutorials for learning how to make the most of Adobe Illustrator, naturally they are applicable to any vector graphics editor.
I came across this nice Photoshop tutorial site the other day. Looking at the tutorials there made me want to try and recreate the same effects, not using Photoshop however, but using only SVG.
With a goal to get the web browsers of today to become more interoperable, the ACID2 test has proven itself valuable. Microsoft recently claimed IE8 would correctly render ACID2, although lately there has been a bit of buzz on what that actually meant. Ian Hickson has started the work on ACID3 and with the competition for test additions being over now, I hope we'll see something more finished soon. A number of SVG tests have been added to the work-in-progress ACID3 test as a result of the competition (see tests 68 - 75).
So lets hope that ACID3 means that non-standard behavior will start to corrode away, resulting in a solid interoperable core of the web that, among other things, includes SVG.
Update: Here's the link to the submission that was made, note that the tests were partially rewritten by Hixie for the official ACID3 test.
Christmas is a time of eating julbord, more or less mandatory watching of Disney cartoons, and also eating the leftovers until the new year starts. Following on that note here is a collection of news from various places relating to SVG, enjoy and have a Happy New Year!
Shelley Powers writes about how to make Wordpress serve XHTML with inline SVG and MathML. Very useful information, when will this be made part of the standard install so that we don't have to tweak Wordpress to work?
While awaiting the official report from the W3C Video workshop it can be noted that Webkit also gains experimental support for Ogg Theora through the use of GStreamer library. Anyway, since the removal of Ogg Theora from the HTML5 draft there has been quite a bit of press on that, I think this post sums it up rather well.
The free and open-source cross-platform SVG editor Inkscape enters "frost" phase for the 0.46 alpha release. Among new features can be noted better support for SVG Filters, PDF import, a paint bucket tool similar to what Illustrator has, a better gradient tool and speed improvements.
Talking at Opera's Engineering Seminar, which was held in Sarpsborg, Norway. All the svg examples and slides are available here. The slides are best viewed in Opera 9.5, and most of the demos can be run in Opera 9.5, but some require the experimental video build in order to run.
The graphics group leader Tim Johansson also presented some really neat demos, but I'll let him tell about them himself. Bascially I can't wait to get all of these changes into a mainstream Opera build, a lot of nice things in store indeed.
Anyway, drinking beer (and the poor excuse for a red wine) reminded me of a joke I once heard [in norwegian/swedish only], though paying ~90 NOK for a beer at the hotel bar, now that's a joke if anything.
Presented some of the new SVG features in Opera 9.5 today, and talked a bit about SVG as a standard and how it relates to HTML5, and Canvas in particular. It was interesting to see the university again, certainly was a bit nicer than when I was a student.
Since I couldn't find a vectorized version of the Lysator logo the slides uses a png version. Perhaps I'll make one for later if no one can point me to an existing one, and I wish I could recommend the vectormagic site, but it really worked really poorly in anything but explorer, and it uses flash. Double ick. However, it does output svg files and outperforms all of the other vectorizers that are freely available, and it's online, so perhaps it just about evens it out.
Here are the slides used for the presentation, in swedish only. The examples that were shown are available as part of the SVG Open 2007 archive.
