Chris Double was kind enough to update the SMIL patch on Bug 21642 for Mozilla and then do some builds for me so I wouldn't have to muddle through the build and patch process. I'm ashamed to admit that so far this has been enough of a deterrant that I haven't bothered to try it out, so I'm really glad Chris did this. The best part is that, in doing this, Chris found Firefox crashing on several tests and was able to update the patch to fix these problems.

Anyway, with the patch, a Mozilla trunk nightly gains about 4.5% to their overall SVG score. Put another way, they score 25/116 on the SVG+SMIL animation tests in the Full test suite. While this isn't in the league of current WebKit nightlies (and neither of these platforms are in the league of Opera 9+), it does show that progress could be made on this were it applied to the trunk (once Firefox 3 ships, of course). Does anyone know if this patch means that a Firefox build would pass those SVG+SMIL tests in Acid 3?

[Update: Chris has made the Firefox builds available for download here]

[Update 2008-04-20: Chris' latest build now makes the SMIL score 38/125, though some tests have now regressed.]

§455 · April 18, 2008 · Firefox, Software, SVG, Web · Comments Off on Firefox Getting Ready To Smile? · Tags: , , ,


I haven't really given a good 'SVG News Digest' in well over a year, but there was enough recent news that I thought I should post a little bit about what's going on in the Scalable Vector Graphics world. Fair warning: This blog post is long, I probably should have spread it over 4-5 days worth of blogging, but I lose patience when queuing up posts... Read the rest of this entry ...

§454 · April 16, 2008 · Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 4 comments · Tags: , , , ,


The latest WebKit nightly now has a decent amount of SVG+SMIL (animation) coverage. By my old school grading system, that gives WebKit a solid 'B' grade in terms of SVG support (75%). This is what I was talking about a few weeks ago and I'm quite happy to see it happen! If they cleaned up their regressions from a few weeks ago (some problems with SVG patterns, I believe), they might even crest 80%.

§452 · April 15, 2008 · Apple, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on WebKit Nightly: Now Smiling · Tags: , , ,


There was a bitchmeme going around. Scoble, Winer got into the act...

Scoble gets a part of right - we don't really have that much control, but Winer hits on what I think is important: There are already solutions for this (Atom Threading Extensions, RFC 4685, and RSS Comments feature). We can't control what people do with our syndicated content, but we can make it easy for tools to auto-discover the conversation specific to a given blog post.

I've made available a 'whole blog feed' and a 'per thread' feed on each post, but I'm really glad that WordPress 2.5 enabled the Atom Threading Extension 'replies' relation by default.

§451 · April 14, 2008 · Life, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Comments and the Blog Conversation · Tags: , ,


Via CNN. My only question: Did they support XHTML output?

§450 · April 7, 2008 · Entertainment, Technology, Web, XML · 1 comment · Tags: