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. Read the rest of this entry ...

§519 · January 30, 2009 · Google, Microsoft, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 6 comments · Tags: , , , , ,


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?

§516 · January 15, 2009 · Firefox, RIA, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 5 comments · Tags: , , , ,


Poo. Declarative animation in SVG won't make it for the Firefox 3.1 release. That's a big shame, though I trust that it's the right decision.

§503 · September 30, 2008 · Firefox, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on No Smiling in Firefox 3.1 · Tags: , ,


I've been watching David's FakeSmile script evolve over the course of the last few months. At the same time, I have been reading up on SMIL Timesheets, a recent specification drafted by the SYMM Working Group. With recent support of timesheets in FakeSmile, I thought it would be a good chance to experiment. Read the rest of this entry ...

§462 · May 19, 2008 · JavaScript, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Smile Zen Garden? · Tags: , , , , , ,


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.]

§455 · April 18, 2008 · Firefox, Software, SVG, Web · Comments Off on Firefox Getting Ready To Smile? · Tags: , , ,