Mike

ideas

Sunday, 11. March 2007, 23:18:11

Wow, it's been a while. I've had other things on my mind and this blog took a backseat...or it wasn't even in the same car, either way. So I've had some ideas for Opera, including the option for different layouts upon installation (Internet Explorer-like, something innovative, etc) as well as the use of microformat collection (from what I hear, Moz.org already hoped on that train but that doesn't mean Opera can't either).

So I've been making some SVGs for Wikipedia as of late. SVG is really amazing and with a minor amount of background work, SVGs could replace a lot of different static raster images on Wikipedia. Since I've spent much of my time making maps of my state of Michigan, my idea for SVG concerning Wikipedia is to have one map of the United States with CSS selectors highlighting the specific state for it's article. This idea could be expanded to state maps highlighting counties, and then county maps highlighting townships/cities/villages. Just wish I knew how to implement it...Of course, this also depends on Wikipedia's SVG backend supporting CSS selectors in SVG, which I haven't actually looked into but I'm guessing it does not.

That is just a really simple idea but a furtherance of it is SVG transforms to "zoom" into a specific area. I'm not really familar with SVG transforms (ha!, that's an understatement) and I'm not entirely sure that this process can be done in a scripted (is that the right term?) way but if it does, then good deal. A nifty, transparent gradiant could be added to the "zoom" effect too...I got the small things down, it's the big things I'm worried about.

Never meet your heroes and other musingsRandom

Comments

orinoco # 13. March 2007, 08:56

Hi Mike

Have you seen this: United States of SVG? If your svg file has each county (district? not sure what you call them in the US) as a seperate path the same script could be applied to your map. Feel free to take the script & add it to your file, or if you are not sure how to do this PM me the link to your file & I'll create one for you.

Mike # 13. March 2007, 21:59

I have seen the United States of SVG and indeed, I've played it and was very impressed. I'm afraid it's not that simple though because support for SVG on Wikipedia is somewhat limited. It would make a very nice demo (which is basically what I want to do now that I think about it). Additionally, I will create a better county map of Michigan, with each path id'd and will attempt to use the script you created in it. My javascript is very rusty but your script is very nicely detailed. Thank you very much offering your help, I appreciate it. I'll do it later tonight, it's too much of a beautiful day (72*F and partly sunny) here in suburban Detroit to stay in and mess with SVG.