The last two years have been explosive for WebKit development - the project has really accelerated, moving at a much faster perceivable rate than the other notable open-source web platform, Mozilla. I've been noticing more and more innovations that affect web developers from the Safari blog. Read the rest of this entry ...
I spent some time a few weeks ago quietly trying to shore up my XHTML defenses on my WordPress install - not everyone is planning to move to Drupal just yet. I have a bunch of patches that are aging. I think three of them are 'good to go' but I need someone to look at them. The patch for Ticket 5998 needs some work to make it applicable across trackbacks and pingbacks as well as ensuring it is applicable only for UTF-8. Unfortunately, no one is really looking at the patches because apparently no one on this planet would bother serving WordPress as true XHTML. Anyway, enough whinging - it would be great if some of these could make it into WordPress 2.5.1.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to try and break my WordPress install by injecting funky XHTML, please be my guest on this page. Currently Sam is in the lead with two breakages (now fixed). Oh, and your name doesn't have to be Philip, Jacques, Mark or Shelley either.
One reason I think Web Applications (as opposed to the now watered-down term of Rich Internet Applications) are great for users and developers, is because they do not need to be installed directly on the user's computer. This is one thing I think Adobe has misunderstood about the 'RIA' revolution with AIR. Read the rest of this entry ...
Chris Double was kind enough to update the SMIL patch on Bug 21642 for Mozilla and then do some builds for me so I wouldn't have to muddle through the build and patch process. I'm ashamed to admit that so far this has been enough of a deterrant that I haven't bothered to try it out, so I'm really glad Chris did this. The best part is that, in doing this, Chris found Firefox crashing on several tests and was able to update the patch to fix these problems.
Anyway, with the patch, a Mozilla trunk nightly gains about 4.5% to their overall SVG score. Put another way, they score 25/116 on the SVG+SMIL animation tests in the Full test suite. While this isn't in the league of current WebKit nightlies (and neither of these platforms are in the league of Opera 9+), it does show that progress could be made on this were it applied to the trunk (once Firefox 3 ships, of course). Does anyone know if this patch means that a Firefox build would pass those SVG+SMIL tests in Acid 3?
[Update: Chris has made the Firefox builds available for download here]
[Update 2008-04-20: Chris' latest build now makes the SMIL score 38/125, though some tests have now regressed.]
I haven't really given a good 'SVG News Digest' in well over a year, but there was enough recent news that I thought I should post a little bit about what's going on in the Scalable Vector Graphics world. Fair warning: This blog post is long, I probably should have spread it over 4-5 days worth of blogging, but I lose patience when queuing up posts... Read the rest of this entry ...