We attended the third and final Web-Based Games Round Table session hosted by Brian Robbins at the GDC this morning. It was focused on the production/design aspects as opposed to the commerce and community issues of the previous two sessions. Read the rest of this entry ...
Ok, I finally got around to updating my SVG web statistics, a little over a month since I first posted them. Many thanks to Johan, Rob and Jonathan for handy code and suggestions. I hope you like it. It's located at the same place as before.
I've added some drag interactivity to it. At this time it is quite responsive in IE+ASV, but less so in other implementations (Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9 TP2). Dragging using my library is slightly slower than it used to be because, in order to get "slider" dragging, I had to add constraints to each draggable entity (so that you can't freeform move it around the page). This adds conditional checking every time the entity is dragged, but I see no way around this. Hopefully smart guys like Johan will take a look at my JS and show me the idiocy of my ways. 😉
Ah, the benefits of keeping your ear to the RSS/Atom wire. I found this entry in the svg-developers Yahoo! newsgroup which hints that the next version of Google Maps will have support for SVG. Looks like my Christmas Wish (see bottom of entry) may come true after all.
I followed some of the links, and it looks like the currently pre-alpha version of the Google Maps API (version 2.37) does indeed use some JavaScript to create a SVG <path> element (search for "svg" and "path"). Unfortunately, this thread says there are some bugs in the code (non-SVG related) that prevent people from using it at the moment.
Of course it's a little premature, maybe Google will decide that integrating SVG within an HTML page is too much of a hack job. I know I have given up once or twice on that, myself due to browser issues but seem to have struck upon a somewhat reasonable solution recently. Of course if they restrict their SVG usage to only Firefox and Opera, it will simplify the integration.
Anyway, if the next version of Google Maps does have SVG support it will surely be a sign that SVG is here to stay (even if Yahoo seems to have gone with a Flash-based approach). Looks like Mozilla's decision to include limited SVG support in Firefox 1.5 was a good one for SVG adoption after all.
klog has written a library that handles drawing "about 80% of basic shapes" for SVG using nothing but DHTML. I haven't tried it out yet, simply because all the browsers on all of my machines support SVG (Internet Explorer with the Adobe plugin, of course). I might actually uninstall ASV on one of my machines just to see how his library works. Read the rest of this entry ...
Johan writes of JSON feeds, which sounds like the nifty idea of making your data available as a chunk of JavaScript that can be easily used by anyone. Apparently del.icio.us already does this. The beauty of this is that, since web developers are already writing in JavaScript, they can just include your chunk of JavaScript in their own web applications and do something cool with it. No parsing of XML or other encoding formats required. Read the rest of this entry ...