• Opera’s “Web Opener” (and newest Interest Group member) makes a request
• Internet Explorer’s Head Honcho gets a little huffy
• Snarkiness

BTW, if you’re not on Twitter yet, you are missing out. For instance, I find this feed useful.

Continuing with the navel-gazing theme, some points I noted in my stats:

• Opera and Safari now amount to 7-10% of my total unique visits
• Since its release last month, Firefox 3 has about the same share as IE7, which was released over a year and a half ago (20% total)
• IE has lost roughly 5% of total share on my site since I’ve started recording these statistics (this is my third year)
• IE6 is still the browser version with the largest single share (roughly 30%). Give Firefox 3 a few more months though…
• Virtually no one is using IE8 Beta 1, released over four months ago. I mean, way more people are using Firefox 3.1 pre-Alpha-1! I see at most one or two hits a week from IE8. Which makes sense because you can’t install multiple copies of IE and there aren’t very many cool things you can do with IE anyway.

Out of 58 tests involving animation, WebKit r31344 fails 54, gets 3 of the tests partially right and only gets 1 test to completely pass. To put this into ‘acid’ terms, this means that WebKit r31344 gets a score of 5/116 when it comes to SVG animation support (as compared to Opera 9.5′s 110/116). See my top-secret scoring mechanism here.

My concern at this point is that releasing such a nonconforming SMIL implementation into the wild will just frustrate authors and users. But I suppose there isn’t much SMIL out there at the moment. Here’s one data point, at least: My menus no longer animate properly in WebKit r31344, producing ‘fluttering’ icons… Is there a way I can turn off WebKit’s native SMIL when visiting my website? Does anyone know of any other sites out there using SMIL in their UI?

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to future Webkit releases that will improve upon the SMIL implementation – and please release the build for Windows too. And I would be remiss if I didn’t congratulate the WebKit team for releasing a downloadable application that shows 100/100 on Acid3. Hopefully this post is just a little bit of cold water in the face to those fans thinking that WebKit is somehow “perfect”

Mozilla Bugs

Bug 418164

Firefox 3 Regression: white-space:pre div forces browser window width

Bug 418305

Enhancement Request: Make Yellow-Screen-Of-Death Follow the Geneva Convention

410820

<svg> elements respond to mouse events when they should not (Not Reported By Me, But Important)

WebKit Bugs

Bug 15214

SVG link with target=”_top” opens new window (FIXED since r25729)

Bug 17423

Enhancement Request: Add support for xml:base

Bug 17424

WebKit Regression: SVG properly positioned only upon Redraw

My Own Fixes

• Phil noticed that the side gradients weren’t being displayed in Opera 9.2 or earlier builds of Opera 9.5. I’ve since “fixed” that by explicitly setting the height of the divs to be 100% (with top:0; bottom:0;).
• Sander reported that there was an annoying horizontal scrollbar in Firefox (also was in Safari). This was a result of me trying to get the menu to display workably in all browsers, including IE. I have since fixed this.
• Sander also pointed out that the &raquo; (and &laquo;) entity is being shown literally in Opera. This is actually the right thing for Opera to do since XHTML doesn’t define any character references like HTML. I need to wrap my head around this and then either add the entity reference or update my WP theme. Haven’t got to it yet.

Is it sick that I enjoyed putting the site together and tweaking it for all the various browsers out there?

I like the idea of having a seamless transition between my blog and website. so this evening I decided to flip the switch on the blog, even though the WordPress theme is very much a work-in-progress. I still need to figure out what to do with the sidebar, but I can always hack away on the theme on my old blog installation internally and publish updates once they have been verified on a set of decent browsers (Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+).

I use SVG in a bunch of different places: inline as decoration around the page (the blue gradient and the title) and referenced (via <object>) for the icon menu (at the top) and W3C validation badges (at the bottom). Once I nail down all the particulars, I’ll compress menu.svg and serve only menu.svgz so it can be neatly cached (at roughly 15kb). But I’ll keep menu.svg around for web developers to look at if they’re curious.

Work on this led to a few bugs reported at Mozilla, WebKit and Opera – but no show stoppers. The best user experience is in Opera 9.5. For the first time, I’m using declarative animation (in a simple way) for icon mouse-hovering. Firefox and Safari users miss out for now, unfortunately.

It turns out, as Shelley has mentioned, that the best developer experience to work on XHTML is also (by far) Opera. Instead of Firefox’s “yellow screen of death” we’re greeted with Opera’s “light grey screen of mild achiness”. Instead of cryptic messages about unexpected tags, the element which failed to be terminated and the tag that broke the XML parsing are highlighted for you.

I encountered some funniness when I tried to validate my pages on the W3C Validator. Apparently it thought they were text/html pages. So I had to add a little catch in my PHP content negotiation code to force application/xhtml+xml when I want to. Anyway, the PHP content negotiation code looks like this:

You might find some of my old site themes amusing, sad, or boring:

• 2004-04 – Early static HTML, table-based layout, no CSS.
• 2005-04 – Reworked into a templated PHP site. Eventually I turned it from table-based to CSS layout-based (snapshot is table-based).
• 2006-01 – Theme from 2006. Using CSS for layout. Embedded SVG aqua buttons for navigation menus. All modern browsers now support the features I was using on this page.

I remember a couple years back when people scoffed at the idea of SVG 1.2 containing a <video> element. The argument went something like “SVG is for Vector Graphics so that’s ALL it should do – how dare you!”. Meanwhile, Macromedia had been expanding its reach in areas of streaming media and HTML was stagnating.

Now, thanks to the WHATWG, HTML is undergoing a rejuvenation of sorts. Version 5 of everyone’s favourite HyperText markup language is likely to contain a <video> element, an <audio> element, a Canvas object and other non-hypertext related things.

Anyway, those guys at Opera have released an experimental build of Opera 9.5 that supports not only HTML video but SVG video too.

What’s fascinating about video inside SVG is that you can do a lot with it. It’s just another region of graphics to the “SVG engine” so you can scale it, shear it, flip it, apply filters to it, put graphics on top of it, etc. Some of their demos are really cool. Like this reflect one. And oh yeah, this Trace Edges one (check out the greyscale too). Can Flash do that? (I honestly don’t know).

I’d like to make a screencast of this so that the truly lazy among you could see the effects without downloading it – but that requires me to re-install the screencasting software – and you really should just go and download it for yourselves anyway.

Now I’ve noted some problems just with these two demos yesterday: In one instance, I couldn’t get the video to stop playing, even though I had closed the tab or navigated away from it (in other words, the audio was still audible) However, I’m sure these kinks will be worked out before the final version of Opera ships.

Go Opera!

Tonight I updated my Firefox extension, FXPointer, so that you can right-click on some web page text and get the XPointer element link that will drive people directly to it. This is the first time the extension comes close to being semi-usable, so I thought I should start to get the word out. It’s very similar to Doug’s excellent Idiri extension, except that FXPointer tries to use the XPointer specification for HTML documents. Thus, it will allow you to link directly to any element in a web page.

Truth be told, Firefox already supports XPointer to some degree on true XML documents. Tragically, it doesn’t work with XHTML documents (see Bug 235409). Worse yet, the amount of HTML on the web vastly outweighs the amount of XHTML, meaning that XPointer will never really reach critical mass without a boost in the HTML direction.

For Opera users, please see Jeroen’s web page that gives you some User JavaScript to get things going. This means that you can get some XPointer/HTML functionality on two of the four big browsers out there.

Anyway, I plan to start using these more-specific links going forward. If you don’t have XPointer support, you’ll just get a less-specific link. I’ll try to make improvements that degrade even more gracefully in the future.

Some future plans that may or may not transpire:

• Support for the xpointer scheme so you can use XPath and search strings (probably less brittle)
• Support for SVG’s XPointer-friendly scheme svgView
• Some configuration of the context menu

If you want to submit patches, download the .xpi, unzip it and hack away.

FXPointer does its best to use IDs where it can, so this is less brittle than it seems, but I still wouldn’t recommend this for any dynamic web pages with wildly changing DOMs. Of course the ultimate would be to support the xpointer scheme in some way such that people can use XPath and string searches.

If you think this extension is useful, please help lobby for native XPointer/HTML support in browsers.

• There appears to be a formal agreement established between Microsoft and Novell to develop and support the Linux-based version of Microsoft’s Silverlight, called Moonlight.
• Speaking of Microsoft, Alex Russell of Dojo speaks of how poorly the Microsoft IE team has communicated future plans. I agree. It’s not a way to build trust among web developers who you’ve pissed off for so long. Where’s the news on the next version of IE after 7?
• Speaking of web browsers, Apple announced the iPodTouch, which will soon put WiFi web browsing capabilities (via Safari) into the hands of many a music geek. Couple that with the iPhone now selling for $200 less and I believe that Safari is soon going to be one of the most widely used browsers out there in the Mobile Web, competing head-to-head with the Opera Mini. When Safari 3 gets out of Beta and is distributed to its millions of users, we’ll suddenly see a huge increase in the number of users that can view SVG.
• Speaking of Opera, I mentioned yesterday that Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 was out. Here are some interesting performance results, though Mozilla evangelist Asa Dotzler is quick to point out that Opera still lacks an auto-update feature.

That’s it for now.

Below is the results of pointing Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 at my Web Statistics page that I made a year and a half ago with SVG and JavaScript. The SVG features several layered path elements of more than 650 data points each with slidable and sizable scrollbars. The performance of Opera 9.5 is about the best there is. If you can put up with the crappy resolution of YouTube, here’s an example of me playing around:

Of course, I’m pretty happy with Opera 9.5′s improved SVG support – it now surpasses all other SVG viewers out there in terms of SVG Test Suite pass/fail scores. There are some more interesting SVG features included (SVG as CSS background-image, SVGT 1.2 features) that I’ll likely be playing with in the next little while.

Note that this is still an Alpha build and such, should be treated as such. While the rendering and scrolling of pages seems really snappy, I’ve noticed when running through the SVG test suite that occasionally pages would “stick” (can’t think of another word for it – they wouldn’t finish loading). Sometimes the loading would eventually finish (a PNG or SVG object would finally load) after some time, but other times I would have to force a reload of the page a couple of times to get it. It’s one of those wrinkles I expect will get ironed out before final release.

And yay, finally ALT-D will focus the Location Bar in all four browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari and now Opera). Guess those guys do listen!