Slightly ajar

During the development of Kestrel, I was hearing of the advancements in our SVG support. Not being a SVG person I wasn't familiar with everything that was added, but I was interested in checking out the W3C SVG test suite to see how our progress was doing. Being a W3C test suite, it looked both intimidating and time consuming so I never got time to run through the tests. Fortunately I didn't have to, as Jeff Schiller took the public Alpha through its paces and updated his support graph.

I'm not sure if this includes SVGT 1.1 or just SVG full 1.1 (I suspect the latter), but Kestrel has improved Opera's support to 93.4% of the test suite. That makes it not only the most compliant browser, but also the most compliant user agent full stop, even beating the impressive Batik 1.7. The closest browser is Firefox 3 with 58%. Now we have full CSS3 selector support, I'm looking forwards to the race to full SVG compatibility, and I think Batik will give us a good run for our money. It's a shame Jeff's chart doesn't show the tests that fail for each browser.

I've heard a number of web developers complain about Opera focusing on SVG, but there is a few reasons for this and it doesn't effect our other work, and I certainly agree it shouldn't be our primary focus, but:

• We have different developers that work on different areas, so working on SVG isn't taking people off JavaScript or CSS layout for example
• SVG was often a carrier requirement for inclusion on mobile devices, and is much more useful and widespread in the mobile world, than it is on desktop.
• It is a standard that shows promise once support is widespread, and if we are going to do something, we are going to do it properly
• SVG is very useful on things like device projects where Opera is the interface to the device using WebUI. Think games consoles for instance
• Other browser vendors like Safari and Firefox are adding SVG support and it shouldn't be too long before get good quality cross browser support. IE will be the problem, and in that way it will be similar to the PNG situation pre IE7, but IE is under active development now and they have a great team, so I wouldn't rule them out.

Now Opera has good compatibility with SVG, developers can take it for a spin and start learning the basics of SVG in preparation for the future. I recommend to start looking at using it for background-images in places that degrade well without the image, such as the gradient example two posts ago. Once Safari and Firefox add support for SVG through CSS you can start using this technique across browser, and send a rasterised png/jpeg version to IE through conditional comments. The size and bandwidth savings should be quite substantial, the scaling is much better and it is so easy to edit the file if you want to change the colour, edit the gradient etc. The possibilities of adjusting the image through the DOM should be fascinating too (rotate a arrow bullet on-click in a tree list for example) , but this wont be so easy to do fallbacks for IE.