Well, I finished authoring my first SVG tutorial today called "SVG Kickstart". You can read it here. It's 5 fairly short pages, but hopefully it gives a good justification for the practical need for SVG on the web today. Future tutorials will likely delve into the more "flashy" effects one can get from SVG...
I mentioned before how I was cissifying my site. Well, I spent about an hour or so updating the rest of my site to be fully XHTML and CSS compliant by using the W3C validator tools (XHTML Validator and CSS Validator).
Sure, web standards are nice, but should it REALLY matter if I have a list element inside a paragraph element or if my form elements are not wrapped inside a paragraph? I guess my point is: after making sure that my site is compliant to the latest web standards out there, where are the fruits of my anal retentive labor? There's not one user-discernable difference as far as I could tell.
On the other hand, after spending about 20 minutes debugging the way Opera was rendering my fancy new SVG buttons, I figured out why their browser was having a problem, patched my code and posted the bug in their forums. Now that's what I call a worthwhile effort.
I spent some time over the last couple days updating my website in three ways:
- Separation between content and presentation by using CSS. It's not perfect yet, but it's much more manageable. Minor tweaks to the UI to make it a little prettier.
- Update site-wide all pages to better use PHP in a modular fashion. The user sees no benefit from this.
- Added a SVG menu and masthead. To see the cool effects, you need an SVG-enabled browser like a Firefox nightly build (1.1 Alpha) or for Internet Explorer you can download the Adobe SVG plug-in (the most complete SVG implementation so far available). Opera supports SVG Tiny, but unfortunately it's still a little buggy and feature-shy (moreso than even Mozilla's implementation).
Jonathan Watt, one of the main Mozilla SVG developers sent me a link to this document which he's working on to help instruct the world how to write proper SVG which Mozilla+SVG will be able to render. Give it a read and send him some feedback.
By the way, I downloaded the latest Deer Park Alpha Build (Firefox 1.1 Alpha) and it has SVG enabled by default.
Just a reminder that the deadline for review comments for SVG Tiny 1.2 Working Draft is only two days away (May 20, 2005).
I spent some time pouring over the document and nitpicking away, but I didn't get finished in time. Overall, the document seems in good shape. I have to cut the SVG Working Group a little slack because the SVG Tiny spec used to be a supplemental doc that was a specific profile of the SVG Full spec. However, in SVG 1.2 the paradigm has shifted such that SVG Tiny is its own complete language spec (and SVG Full will be an extension of SVG Tiny). I talked about this in the past too. Anyway, there must have been significant document merging, cutting, etc to re-arrange things so I can understand why some URLs are broken and some code samples include features that aren't even in SVG Tiny. They still need to be fixed though! 🙂
One problem I've seen with specifications (in general) is that they often contain many little errors and lack precision (i.e. are too ambiguous) and this results in more time on the user end trying to figure it out or post in mailing lists. Some may consider this anal-retentive, but I call it courtesy to the reader. Most importantly, if you're going to provide code samples or mathematical descriptions, they'd better be exact with no errors, otherwise you're just frustrating the user who has taken the time to try and understand what you're writing about. For this reason (and the fact that I can't contribute much else at this time), most of my comments are:
- typos (scattered throughout the doc)
- incorrect code examples/mathematical formulae (Sections 5.9.2, 7.7.3, and 7.7.4 have some errors in them)
- clarifications (Sections 5.1, 5.9.2, 5.9.3, 5.11, 9.3 and 9.4 could all use fleshing out)
- minor suggested improvements (Example 07_07.svg in Section 7.5 could be improved)
Submit your comments to the SVG W3C mailing list with prefix "[SVGMobile12]" in the subject. You can view archives of the mailing list (including all my comments) here. You can read my blog topics on SVG here.