• Certificates that enable wifi at work were not migrated
• Safari 4 was not migrated (I was left with Safari 3.2.1 on the new box)

I only realized the latter when I noticed that some SMIL animation had stopped working in Safari

• Apple finally pushed a firmware update to their iPhones that makes Safari support SVG. I first heard about it here and then Doug blogged about it.
• Mozilla finally landed SVG effects for HTML, presumably for Firefox 3.1 but I’ll be keeping an ear to roc’s blog for further updates on that.
• Work on the Flex SVG Viewer (FSV) has started to pick up. It is now released under the MIT license and just had its first contributed patch. More on this at a later time.
• Some guy named Tim Berners-Lee chastised Internet Explorer for not supporting SVG and that article has been picked up by the Associated Press – who does he think he is?
• The W3C SVG Interest Group garnered several new members within the last couple days and chatter has picked up on the Mailing List which is a hopeful sign that we’re starting to gel a bit. If you care about SVG and can help in some tangible way, I invite you to consider joining.

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.

• 2008-04-29 – CSS Reflections
• 2008-04-24 – CSS Masks
• 2008-04-17 – CSS Canvas Drawing
• 2008-04-14 – CSS Gradients
• 2008-04-08? – CSS Transitions
• 2007-10-31 – CSS Animation (spec proposal)
• 2007-10-26 – CSS Transforms (spec proposal)
• 2006-12-21 – Text Fill and Stroke
• 2004? – HTML Canvas – thankfully this was quickly reviewed and thrown into HTML5 so that Opera and Mozilla could get into the act
• Others -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing, -webkit-border-vertical-spacing, -webkit-margin-bottom-collapse, -webkit-margin-collapse, -webkit-margin-start, -webkit-margin-top-collapse, -webkit-padding-start, background-position-x, background-position-y, -webkit-tap-highlight-color (iPhone only), -webkit-text-security, -webkit-text-size-adjust (iPhone only), -webkit-line-break, -webkit-nbsp-mode, -webkit-rtl-ordering, -webkit-user-drag, -webkit-user-modify, -webkit-user-select, -webkit-dashboard-region (Dashboard only)

Is this a problem?

What’s troubling me is not that many of these inventions could have been done using SVG (which WebKit now supports quite nicely). I understand that XML is not for everyone and that a few CSS properties are easier to pick up to do what you want.

No, what troubles me is that a few of these innovations are not yet proposed as formal specifications so that they can be interoperably implemented in other browsers (Firefox, Opera). [Update: Correction - as Mark points out below, several of these have indeed been proposed as formal specifications - Bravo!] The point of the WHATWG effort was both to evolve HTML and to specify it in sufficient detail so that future browser vendors would not have to reverse engineer de facto browser behavior. Will the WHATWG eventually have to churn out CSS5?!?

On the other hand…

… Apple has a perfect right to introduce WebKit-specific CSS properties. WebKit is more than just a single web browser. WebKit is a platform and Apple obviously wants to put as many cool web development tools into the hands of its developers as possible. They’re already doing a good job at meeting existing open web standards – why not innovate on the side? Also, using CSS ensures that things can degrade gracefully, so you can’t quite fault Apple for ‘anti-competitve behavior’ like you could Microsoft and Netscape’s efforts during the First Browser War.

Unfortunately…

Unfortunately these inventions might have the same secondary effect: Forcing the other browser vendors to spend resources on reverse-engineering efforts in order to remain competitive. This could realistically happen before Apple gets a chance to propose these things formally to the W3C. [Update: See Mark's comment below]. It is much more likely to happen if WebKit were to become the dominant force on the open web.

WebKit is not yet the dominant web browser technology, but it’s fast on the rise. From all accounts, it is much easier to pick up and hack on than the Mozilla codebase. Let’s take a look at where it is being used:

• MacOS Dashboard
• Safari on MacOS
• Safari on iPhone
• Google’s Android
• Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR)
• Qt 4.4+
• Nokia S60 Browser

I’m sure readers can help me add to the above list too. I believe there is a plan for WebKit to ultimately take over Konqueror’s KHTML guts one day too, isn’t there? Ironic since WebKit evolved from KHTML in the first place.

So when will it be a problem?

Are we seeing any signs of a trend towards a WebKit-dominated web yet? There are already iPhone-specific websites. How long before Opera Mobile and Mozilla Minimo want to get in on that action and are forced to reverse-engineer? And I’m sorry, but looking at the source is not an acceptable alternative to a well-defined specification.

A tentative conclusion

After typing up this entry and proof-reading it, I tried to discern if I had any coherent conclusion and if I could figure out just what the heck I was saying:

• Apple is not in the wrong for introducing WebKit-specific CSS properties, I think they learned their lesson from the HTML Canvas experience.
• You also cannot fault Apple for its adherence to web standards. They are definitely doing their job here
• It seems like they plan to propose these things as standards eventually, which is also a good thing.
• I guess the only thing I can say is that I hope these proposals happen sooner rather than later, for the other browsers’ sake. [Update: As mentioned below, Apple has already proposed many of these things to the W3C as specifications, thereby alleviating most of my concern]. Apple should take a page from what happened to DOM Events: The fact that Netscape and Microsoft had two different event models resulted in the W3C proposing yet a third incompatible Event Model, which Microsoft still has not implemented eight years later. Those type of things just hurt web developers in the end.

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 downloaded the latest (r29336) to see what’s what. When you download and unzip a nightly, you have to have Safari 3 Beta installed. Then you are supposed to be able to double-click the “run-nightly-webkit.cmd” invocation script from the nightly zip and away we go. When I double-clicked the script, a whole bunch of files were copied (I did not know where to though) and then I got an error dialog:

The procedure entry point ucol_open_3_6 could not be located in the dynamic link library icuin36.dll

The DLL in question is in the Safari 3 Beta directory so I can only assume that the WebKit is expecting a newer version of icuin36.dll that I don’t have. I even uninstalled Safari 3 and re-installed just in case I had something stale in there. No luck. Where can I get the latest icuin36.dll? Dunno…

Then I tried some earlier builds. Build r29177 (2008-01-09) had the exact same problem. Build r28899 (2007-12-20) did run and then immediately crashed.

Looking at the script, I noticed that it copies a bunch of files from Safari 3 Beta and the nightly directories into a temporary location in Windows and then sets up a PATH environment variable and invokes it. I see nothing wrong with what they’re doing there. It then detects if Visual C++ 8 is installed and if so, attempts to set up the same environment variables (presumably this is so you can debug crashes in VC8). Attempting to figure out what’s the problem with invoking the nightly build, I removed this check (as if I didn’t have VC8 installed) and it did run this time (without a crash). I put that check back into the invocation script and tried again and this time no crash. Hm, that first crash must have been a one-time thing. Ok, so at least I can test out WebKit as of 2 weeks ago…

Anyway, what’s the policy on nightly builds for WebKit in Windows? Is anybody smoke-testing them? I’ve had much better luck with Firefox nightlies and I was hoping for a similar experience here. Anyone else seeing the DLL problem? Anyone know how to fix it?

I was looking at the comments from last year’s entry and it’s good to see that we’ve now seen definite progress from Safari’s side on the whole SVG front. Still no word from IE though

For me, I’m still holding out on buying an Apple product – it’s not a boycott, it’s just that I already have a free mobile phone and a cheap DAP. We’ll see how the iPodTouch fares – that might be what I need (an audio player that lets me browse the web over WiFi). Some may claim that it makes more sense to spring for the iPhone because the iPhone is only $100 more – but it’s the 2-year AT&T chokehold that I dislike…