Apparently Steve Ballmer has publicly stated that Microsoft plans to look into Webkit... that's news to me! Microsoft's browser needs to support modern web standards: HTML4, XHTML, CSS, SVG and as much HTML5 as is ready for deployment.
But Microsoft has also publicly been "looking into" SVG for years and years, so I'm not going to hold my breath.
These days, Internet Explorer is the last browser I look at... as long as all my textual content is actually visible, then that's just fine by me.
Rather than twittering these and missing a sizable chunk of people who might be interested, I thought I'd post a couple quick links to very cool news in the SVG world: Read the rest of this entry ...
Imagine for a moment:
Yes this could really happen. So how do we fix it?
I took 20 minutes and added a feature request to my SVG Web Stats web application tonight: Now you can switch the timeline graph from Traffic mode to Distribution mode, which shows the share of each browser on my site as a percentage of the total. Read the rest of this entry ...
Shelley has a good long read about web standards, Silverlight, etc. I haven't yet installed Silverlight (I'm on Linux most of the time) so I can't even look at the effect everyone's getting all gooey about over at the Hard Rock Cafe site. Maybe one day I'll get around to it. Unless it's truly 3D effect, I have a hard time believing that the effect can't be done using SVG and SMIL and made to work in 3 of the 4 major browsers today. And this with standards that have been around for more than half a decade. So there. Nyah.
Speaking of plugins, I've been watching this guy continue to improve his SVG viewer (a SWF file that runs in Adobe's Flash player) with about an update per week. Interesting idea (which has been pursued before incidentally). I'll be really impressed if he can get the thing to a point where SMIL and scripting can be implemented.
Still, nothing beats some type of native support. In the meantime, I'd even accept 'native' plugin support from the big stick-in-the-muds. I still haven't ruled out the idea that one day in the future, the Silverlight or Flash plugins might suddenly be able to render SVG directly, with no translation step in between. Here's hoping for Flash 11 and Silverlight 3... Why not? They both already support a scripting engine, interactivity, XML parsing, animation, vector graphics, gradients, etc. Hm, why not, indeed.
