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%.
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 ...
I had an epiphany of sorts this morning when discussing something with a colleague. Mind you, my day job now revolves around SVG so I am definitely biased but: If you wanted to create a vector image that is displayable on a variety of platforms and products, the only format that makes sense these days is SVG. It IS the interoperable choice for vector graphics. We have a lot of things to thank for this:
- Wikipedia's adoption of SVG as preferred image format
- Browser take-up of native rendering: Opera, Webkit, Firefox
- Platforms like Qt and Gnome continuously improving support for SVG
- Mobile industry take-up of SVG as the graphics format of choice (even mandated by 3GPP in Europe)
- Continuously improving tool support: Inkscape, NetBeans, Xara, Sketsa, GIMP, Ikivo
- Toolkit and CMS are now starting to take-up SVG: dojo and drupal
- Lots and lots of Free Clip Art (woops, the secret is out)
It's definitely a different world than it was 3-4 years ago. I don't think there's anything stopping the SVG train. Based on this, I think Microsoft and renewed Adobe support of SVG is inevitable. It's just sad that we'll likely have to drag them kicking and screaming (and only after Silverlight gets decent penetration, probably).