Cameron Adams decided to benchmark Flash, SVG, Canvas and HTML5 using a particle engine he created. Not surprising (to me anyway), the SVG scores were the worst of the bunch. This stands to reason: does each particle really need to be a DOM element? Nonetheless, I decided to see what I could do to make the SVG scores suck less. I thought I'd use it as an opportunity to also teach some techniques.
Update: Added some browser scores for Nov 2011
To help kick off the new SVG community site, I thought I'd write up a tutorial and post it there. It's a quickie and it's maybe a couple years out of style, but it's got some pretty pictures: Gelcap Buttons in SVG. (Some people call these 'aqua buttons').
Disclaimer: The PlanetSVG website is still largely under construction, so please be gentle. Rob is working on a Drupal theme and we still have to plan out the overall flow of the site.
Alp Toker, one of those graphics heavy hitters, has woken up to give us a nice summary about the 'skia' graphics library which Google uses for the Chrome browser. I like that it has animation and SVG awareness 'out of the box', but it probably won't be a major player until it's fully ported to all the major desktop platforms and has matured a little.
I received a copy of Shelley Powers' new book, Painting the Web