If you're wondering what happened to my pretty site earlier today, no it was not some malicious XHTML prank, it was my premature support for CSS Naked Day. Dustin changed it to April 9th this year - that's rather silly considering the PHP function is supposed to do the work for us. I suspect lots of sites will be going naked today inadvertently.
After the announcement that the Apple developers have turned on their SMIL support in order to pass Acid3 test, I was excited enough to download the MacOS nightly and run through the SVG animation test suite. I was pretty disappointed. Read the rest of this entry ...
WebKit and Opera are really scrambling to be the first browser to fully pass Acid 3. First, Opera claimed they were at 100/100 in a private build, then Ian corrected the test (based on feedback from Apple developers), presumably knocking Opera back to 99/100. And just now, the WebKit guys have turned on SVG Animation (SMIL) in their nightly builds, putting them also at 99/100. This was a surprise to me, since I had heard that their SMIL implementation was not ready for prime-time, so to speak. Oh well, this is great - now we have a second browser implementing SMIL natively and we can truly start pushing for interoperable solutions.
What does it mean for Apple and Opera fans? Probably a lot. What does it mean for web standardistas? Apple and Opera care (more?). What does this all actually mean for web developers at the moment? Not a single thing. Oh well, time to tally up my own similarly-meaningless SVG support score...
[Update 10:25 PM CST: Apple did it. They are the first to achieve 100/100 in Acid3 with a publicly downloadable browser (even if it is only for MacOS)]
David Leunen has released a new JavaScript library to fake SMIL for modern browsers that do not yet support declarative animation (Firefox 3.0- and Safari 3.0-). The nice thing about this is that it uses existing standards, so that when Mozilla and WebKit finally implement SMIL, this script will avoid executing. On that day, suddenly animations will become less processor-intensive. I'm all about progressive enhancement, but I'm also not above occasionally faking it a little to experiment with cool features. Read the rest of this entry ...
From a discussion that started with bitterness and vitriol and half-flames came forth a semi-useful discussion in which I was a mere observer. To me, the pinnacle of usefulness came with Henri Sivonen's post which contained a list of use cases. Here was an important one Read the rest of this entry ...