The good folks at Opera have quietly rolled out the first Beta version of their Dev.Opera website, a "community resource site where developers can share tips, tricks, extensions and more".
There are some articles on the site that delve into SVG, JavaScript, Ajax, etc. I'm writing a series of articles there about integrating SVG into web applications, so walk on over there and check it out (read Part One).
I reported many months ago that Microsoft's Virtual Earth web app was using SVG to render path data when getting directions. At the time, I complained that Google Maps was not yet doing it, though their code looked like it supported it. I was looking for directions and decided to check it out using Firefox's DOM Inspector - and sure enough, they are using SVG now to draw the path data in Firefox 2 (and using Microsoft's VML in Internet Explorer).
Ironically, Virtual Earth looks like it has much more functionality, yet most of it is broken in Firefox 2 (not in Firefox 1.5). For instance, the paths are not showing up for me in Firefox 2. Furthermore, Virtual Earth seem completely broken in Opera 9 which is a significant step backwards from 5 months ago.
[Editor's Note: To avoid confusion and spreading of mis-information, I feel it's my duty to state that Adobe later changed their decision about removing the SVG Viewer download from their site. As of Dec 2006, Adobe has decided to keep the viewer download available indefinitely.]
In an effort of good will, Adobe has modified their plans to End-of-Life their widely used SVG Viewer plugin. The new plan is for support to end January 1, 2008 and for downloads of the viewer to end by January 1, 2009. Looks like all the blog complaints helped. Here's a link to the FAQ (in PDF format, of course! 😉 ).
Some interesting tidbits from the FAQ:
[Editor's Note: To avoid confusion and spreading of mis-information, I feel it's my duty to state that Adobe later changed their decision about removing the SVG Viewer download from their site. As of Dec 2006, Adobe has decided to keep the viewer download available indefinitely.]
Via JD on EP. Adobe announces End-Of-Life for SVG Viewer. I've tried to keep optimistic about the Adobe purchase of Macromedia but I guess I always knew it was a matter of time before Adobe draws the line and says "No more open standards". It's unfortunate because it was the one thing that I still liked about Adobe - I can't stand their bloated PDF viewer, FrameMaker or Photoshop anymore.
I think at the very least, Adobe should take into account former employee Jon Ferraiolo's suggestions. Since the Adobe SVG Viewer is the only realistic and mature option for SVG content in Internet Explorer for the conceivable future, removing it as a download in January 2008 could only be taken as an openly hostile move against the SVG development community. Even if IE8 moved fast and included some support for SVG it would not be truly ready for primetime by the time Adobe removes its download.
If we don't receive any concessions from Adobe on this, what is the development community left with? Develop an IE browser plugin out of Mozilla? A Batik-based browser plugin? Do we look to Amanith or Renesis?
Personally I'm going to keep my eye on Dojo2D since it's been in my mind for some time that I need to start moving up the stack in terms of web development anyway.
I try to summarize the most relevant news from the world of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) every month. Here’s the digest for July 2006. Read the rest of this entry ...
