It's hard to keep track of all the new things happening with Scalable Vector Graphics lately. It's being used for all sorts of projects ever since the Firefox 1.5 browser was released.

Eclipse just released a SVG Viewer and Editor as part of the "Buildap" tool (a "Visual Component Based Development framework"). They say it can be used from within Eclipse or as a standalone download. It is based on Batik. Looks like I should spend some time learning Eclipse.

Looks like Treebuilder is back online with a nice new interface. All the games and SVG experiments are in-place. Some nice SVG icons/artwork too. No entries in his blog yet. Welcome Back, Holger.

Via Rafe Colburn. Google has published an interesting webstats survey they did in December 2005 on how developers use HTML.

What raises the eyebrows for me is that the result graphs of the survey are all published in SVG and they do not provide any alternative raster images. If they are trying to widely publish their results, truthfully it's not the best way to convey their information, but perhaps there is a message here? Google also specifically recommends using Firefox 1.5 to view the results. This is the first time I've heard of Google endorsing the use of SVG (I'm not counting Google Analytics, since that was really Urchin Software). I wonder if we'll soon see a version of Google Local using SVG to draw the route paths, markers, etc for Firefox and Opera ?

I like the Google Code page. The atmosphere is very casual and open, and it really gives you the feeling that Google is chock full of people who are very interested in seeing the web advance (looking at HTML 5, using SVG, etc). In general, Microsoft blogs attempt to do the same thing but they don't come across that way (usually are very tight-lipped about what future specifications they might support in their products, for instance).