Several months ago, Opera approached me to write some articles for Dev.Opera, their resource site for web developers (currently still in Beta). Today they've posted the second article in my series, dealing with how to use SVG to enhance your web applications.
Please go read my latest article: SVG Evolution 2 and give me some feedback.
Apparently the Chicago area is supposed to be hit with the biggest snowstorm in 28 years for December 1st. So, in celebration, I've turned on the snow in my blog header. For those with cool web browsers like Firefox 1.5+ or Opera 9 (or even the not-cool browser Internet Explorer with the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin) you might need to right-click in the image frame to force reload ... or wait until your browser's cache pops. For those curious, the SVG does not display at all using Emiasys' Renesis plugin ... pooh.
Anyway, sorry for the CPU hit, but 'tis the season. If anyone can let me know if a Safari nightly build displays the snow yet, that would be awesome - you can consider it your Christmas present to me.
Hm, I wonder if I should try to modify the library to use the Dojo2D API in the Dojo toolkit for that true cross-browser effect. That might prove to be a fun little project and a good way to dip my toe in the Ajax toolkit pool...
[Update: Merry Christmas to me. Allan Jardine tells me in his comment below that it's snowing in Safari too. Great news!]
I've been using Opera 9 as my default browser for the last 6 months and here are some of the features I'd have a hard time living without if I moved back to Firefox. Read the rest of this entry ...
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.