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.
Google is going to release a new open-source web browser tomorrow (Sept 2nd, 2008) called Google Chrome. Lots of information contained in forty pages of this comic book. The rendering engine is WebKit, but it has its own JavaScript engine (V8) that compiles the JS into bytemachine code and uses more efficient garbage collection. It also follows the thoughts of the Internet Explorer team of putting the tab at the root of the UI and letting each tab be its own process (not just thread). Oh, it comes with Google Gears pre-installed too.
This all sounds good: security, stability, anti-phishing, sandboxing, 'superfast' JS. Of course there's only one true test though.
At first I was wondering if this was a fork of WebKit, but I think the only thing that would make sense would be for Google to work in parallel with WebKit (continually updating Chrome's rendering engine with new versions of WebKit). Everything else would be part of the Chrome open source project. If you're in the know, drop a line below.
Ok, I'm happy. A completely open source browser that supports SVG and is (sort of) co-sponsored by two big companies with lots of cash (Google and Apple).
Imagine for a moment:
- Joe User knows nothing about the SVG format other than it's an image format.
- Starts a new document in Inkscape
- Imports a raster image (PNG) from the hard drive
- Saves image as SVG
- Uploads the SVG file to a clip art website
- Is baffled why the image displays fine on his computer in the browser but is blank for everyone else
Yes this could really happen. So how do we fix it?
- Warn during Import stage of local references?
- Warn during Save stage of local references?
- Embed raster as a data: url in the SVG source (breaking link with local file)?
I'd like to apologize to all of the browser viewers out there who have been swallowing my uncompressed pages all this time. I just turned on the gzip option under Options > Reading in the WordPress admin panel. I also tidied up my css and the HTML markup generated by my PHP. That's always fun...
I received a copy of Shelley Powers' new book, Painting the Web