I took 20 minutes and added a feature request to my SVG Web Stats web application tonight: Now you can switch the timeline graph from Traffic mode to Distribution mode, which shows the share of each browser on my site as a percentage of the total. Read the rest of this entry ...
Shelley has a good long read about web standards, Silverlight, etc. I haven't yet installed Silverlight (I'm on Linux most of the time) so I can't even look at the effect everyone's getting all gooey about over at the Hard Rock Cafe site. Maybe one day I'll get around to it. Unless it's truly 3D effect, I have a hard time believing that the effect can't be done using SVG and SMIL and made to work in 3 of the 4 major browsers today. And this with standards that have been around for more than half a decade. So there. Nyah.
Speaking of plugins, I've been watching this guy continue to improve his SVG viewer (a SWF file that runs in Adobe's Flash player) with about an update per week. Interesting idea (which has been pursued before incidentally). I'll be really impressed if he can get the thing to a point where SMIL and scripting can be implemented.
Still, nothing beats some type of native support. In the meantime, I'd even accept 'native' plugin support from the big stick-in-the-muds. I still haven't ruled out the idea that one day in the future, the Silverlight or Flash plugins might suddenly be able to render SVG directly, with no translation step in between. Here's hoping for Flash 11 and Silverlight 3... Why not? They both already support a scripting engine, interactivity, XML parsing, animation, vector graphics, gradients, etc. Hm, why not, indeed.
Despite my best intentions and my inner voice crying out "microblogging is stupid!", I've been slowly sucked into it. It started innocently enough with the Facebook status. Then I joined the party over at Twitter just to see what all the hubbub was about. When I learned about identi.ca, I decided to check that out a couple days ago (more and more people are joining there now).
The problem, of course, is that not everyone is on the same social network. And you might not want to be on any of the social networks that I'm on. Or you might not trust any of those companies. Enter ping.fm. Read the rest of this entry ...
Renesis 1.2 was supposed to be released on or about yesterday. Maybe it will come today? It would be a good little birthday present. Seven of Nine bugs marked as Fixed in 1.2 are mine, so I've been looking forward to it for about a month. Who knows, I might be able to recommend it one day as a viable replacement for the Adobe SVG Viewer.
I had the idea within the SVG IG to use Google Doctype to build up SVG reference documentation (better than what is currently at wiki.svg.org), since DocType is supposed to be all about the "open web stack". Since the articles are copyright Google but licensed under the Creative Commons license, I figure this can't hurt if Google turns all evil on us one day.
However, any time I've experimented with Doctype has shown that the project isn't quite ready yet for primetime. I base this on the fact that every time I try to submit a change, I get a long delay and then a 502 error. Mark has assured me they are working on both short term and long term solutions to this problem. He also offered to give me offline commit access to add SVG articles (and even tests) en masse to Doctype. That was a couple weeks ago, maybe now that holidays are over this can become reality? 🙂