CodeDread Blog » mozilla

Oh The Things You’ll Learn

Jeff — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:35:25 +0000

I was playing around with a new project recently and wanted to figure out the complementary color of a given color. All you need for this are the RGB values of the color for which you want to find the complement.

There are lots of ways of specifying a color on the Open Web:

rgb(255,0,0)
rgb(100%,0,0)
#FF0000
#F00
“red”

And it’s not just the 17 CSS color names, there are 147 cool-sounding extended color names like papayawhip. So given that a user can input a color in all sorts of ways, what’s the right way to do this?

The Hard Way

You can build a parser that determines the color format, parses hex and rgb strings and has a table that maps 147 strings to rgb triplets. It turns out there are a lot of JavaScript libraries that already do this. Here’s one.

But then I thought: why am I including yet another JavaScript library to do this parsing when the browser must already know how to map from hex, rgb or color name to an RGB triplet (or equivalent) in order to render the color in the first place? Surely there’s a way to extract this directly out of the DOM?

The DOM Way

It turns out there is. It’s called the CSS DOM and I always seem to forget about this document. Piecing together information from the SVG DOM and the CSS DOM, this is how you would get the red value of a fill attribute on a circle:

var red = someCircle.getPresentationAttribute("fill").rgbColor.red.getFloatValue(1);

That’s just a bit perverse, but at least it’s possible.

In testing this I was delighted to discover that Opera and WebKit let me do it. Sadly, Firefox does not.

The Best-Laid Plans…

Here’s where the plot thickens. Seems like the CSS Working Group was chartered to produce a new version of the CSS DOM to make the interfaces less clunky. Seems like the CSS WG sent out a notice strongly warning browsers not to implement certain DOM interfaces in the CSS DOM. Seems like it’s six years later and there’s no new document.

Unfortunately this is where my sad little tale ends. Erik of Opera suggests that the SVGT 1.2 uDOM is really the right way to do this. It doesn’t matter that I agree with him because I don’t think Webkit or Mozilla have any interest in implementing this any time soon.

It seems kind of sad that folks have to write JavaScript libraries to do color parsing when the browsers already do this natively. It also seems really weird that the SVG DOM interfaces extend obsolete CSS DOM interfaces (SVGColor extends CSSValue which Bert Bos mentions in his email).

#DOMFAIL ?

So… What’d I Miss?

Jeff — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:52:31 +0000

So having gone through my 1000+ unread feed items, emails, blog comments and sundries, here’s what I think I missed while on our pilgrimage to worship a mouse in the south. Feel free to clue me in further in the comments below. Oh, and the vacation was fantastic, fwiw, though I did miss internet access that wasn’t filtered through the foggy and tiny lens of WML. I gots to get me one of them new-fangled phones that can browse the real web real soon now.

SVG Support Tables Now Interactive

Someone mashed together the data I publish with my SVG support tables and made it much more interactive and useful! Great! That’s what makes the web so cool: sharing. Now to see if I can break his scraping script… Joking!

IE9 Likely To Support SVG?!?

As “reported” in Wired and Ajaxian: Golly. How much? When? What version/profile? Sorry, but it seems that this is a misinterpretation of the standard SVG party line from Microsoft. Mumble, grumble, integrity… journalism… something, something, mumble…

More Mozilla SMIL Progress

Brian Birtles posts on the latest progress on Mozilla implementing SMIL-in-SVG. I’m hoping to see SMIL pick up, particularly as browser native support improves further. Of course you can get a headstart on this by using the FakeSmile shim right now in 4 of the 5 big browsers.

Qt Winning Votes?

Doug seems to agree with me that a LGPL for Qt could be a big game changer. I admit, I’ve always had a soft spot for Qt, but the recent news that it will be available to commercial projects without purchasing a license from Nokia is getting a lot of people excited – even heavy fans of Java

Google I/O Registration Open

I might actually try to attend the Google I/O conference this year in May. Rob and I tried to get our ducks in a row last year but the planning never crystallized. I’ve been doing some playing with Android recently, so there’s actually a reason for me to go this year.

Put The Students To Work!

Jeff — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:04:59 +0000

I’m delightfully surprised at how much attention Mozilla is apparently giving SVG. First they’ve hired jwatt to work full-time on SVG. Now it looks like some students also have an interest in advancing the SVG implementation within Mozilla. Great!

I don’t have the experience of a seasoned Mozilla hacker (only a couple patches years ago), but I do know that SMIL, SVG Fonts, SVG in CSS and SVG text-specific edge cases could use some work from a SVG 1.1 perspective. Hopefully they get in contact with jwatt, rlongson, roc, dholbert and birtles and get some ideas rolling…

Houston, the SMIL has landed

Jeff — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 06:38:53 +0000

This day was five-and-a-half years in the making: the initial patch to add SMIL support has landed on Mozilla trunk. SMIL is the Open Web way of doing declarative animation, I use it on my site here and there via FakeSmile. This Mozilla patch is partial support for SMIL within SVG only (not HTML). Note that SMIL support is disabled in the build by default, as roc says “we should enable it when we’ve got enough implemented that we wouldn’t feel embarrassed about shipping it. ” – but this is a significant step forward.

Thanks and congratulations go to Daniel, Brian and Robert! Also thanks to Erik and Ian for putting some SMIL tests into Acid3. Not that this had anything to do with it. Oh, no.

Opera has supported SMIL in SVG for a couple years now. Anyone want to place bets on who will be the second to release a browser that supports it? Mozilla? Apple? Google? Microsoft? What, did I say something funny?

Ubuntu 7.10 Dash Crash

Jeff — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:55:45 +0000

I recently tried to compile Daniel Holbert’s SMIL patches in mozilla-central. While doing this, I observed the “configure” was core dumping. The folks in the #developers channel over on irc.mozilla.org were able to help me out and trace it down to the fact that Ubuntu’s dash was crashing. I worked around this by changing Mozilla’s configure script to use #!/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/sh.

Apparently this crash has been fixed on Ubuntu 8.10 because Daniel himself hasn’t witnessed this crash?