ed.blog

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.
  
• Robert O'Callahan (Mozilla) writes:
  

  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.

  I'll just let his work speak for itself.
  

Microsoft tries to improve web standards support in IE8 apparently...well, except for...

Known issues we are not planning to change in IE8

1. <OBJECT> is not parsed in a cross-browser compatible way (parsing stops at the OBJECT, whereas other browsers continue parsing all the fallback content and make it available. No support for this parsing behavior is planned for IE8; I'll take this opportunity to ask for real-world scenarios that can help me prioritize this feature.
   
2. <OBJECT> elements cannot be 'reactivated' by dynamically correcting the attributes that caused the original fallback. Again, your feedback on the potential benefits/use-cases for this feature appreciated.
   

Source: IE8Blog

Being web standards compliant is not important enough?

Anyway, in practice it means that IE users won't be able to see most graphics on my blog. I usually provide some kind of fallback content for the

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.

Eric Meyer writes:

...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.

One of my favorite Nintendo Wii games at the moment is Guitar Hero III, where you play songs using a guitarshaped Wiimote thingie. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the game already. Since not every office in the world is lucky enough to actually have a Wii, and fewer still are equipped with such a guitar or two, I thought I'd share a game similar to Guitar Hero that was created for the Assembly 2006 Game Development Competition, it's called Frets on Fire.

What's neat about this game you ask? Well...you don't need a guitar to play it, you use the keyboard (optionally held upside down and with a custom strap). Also the game uses SVG files for some of the graphics. As if that wasn't enough you can add songs to it (oh, and it's compatible with Guitar Hero I and Guitar Hero II songs), you can modify the source code since it's open source, you can edit the graphic files and it works on all major desktop operating systems.

Enjoy!

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.