Slightly ajar

While it is probably well known within the SVG community (or not judging by the number of SVG sites that block Opera, and tell the user to download Firefox), there is maybe a lack of awareness in the web design community at large about just how many strides Opera has made in its SVG 1.1 support. As this test from Jeff Schiller states:

In roughly a year, the Opera browser went from being one of the least usable SVG implementations (no scripting/DOM support) to the best native implementation and achieved a higher score than the famed Adobe SVG Viewer

Opera has the best native SVG support of any browser on the market, and is only beat out by Batik 1.7 (great work guys) for the most compliant engine. Things don't stand still however, and I've already blogged previous about support for using SVG as a background image and list image in CSS in internal builds of Opera Kestrel. This is not the only improvements however. Kestrel will also support:

• Support for using SVG files in the image element
• SVG Tiny 1.2 vector-effect [Spec]
• SVG Tiny 1.2 navigation [Spec]
• SVG Tiny 1.2 handler [Spec]
• Speed improvements and optimisations
• Many general bug fixes of our support of animations, text, SVG DOM methods and filters

Not only that, but Kestrel is still in active development, and there will be further support for SVG added before it goes final. But for much of this one doesn't have to wait until Kestrel goes into public beta. This is because The Internet Channel for Wii includes some of the modules from the Kestrel branch of our core rendering engine. This means that some of our improvements, both to CSS3 selectors and SVG 1.1 are already out there, sitting next to your TV, ready to be checked out. Bare in mind that the Wii is limited to two fonts, so visual results may vary. Go check it out and see what you think…

New to SVG, or want to check out some techniques? Go check out our tutorials on Dev.Opera.