Oh The Things You’ll Learn

I was playing around with a new project recently and wanted to figure out the complementary color of a given color. All you need for this are the RGB values of the color for which you want to find the complement.

There are lots of ways of specifying a color on the Open Web:

  • rgb(255,0,0)
  • rgb(100%,0,0)
  • #FF0000
  • #F00
  • "red"

And it's not just the 17 CSS color names, there are 147 cool-sounding extended color names like papayawhip. So given that a user can input a color in all sorts of ways, what's the right way to do this? Read the rest of this entry ...

§539 · June 27, 2009 · Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 8 comments · Tags: , , ,

So… What’d I Miss?

So having gone through my 1000+ unread feed items, emails, blog comments and sundries, here's what I think I missed while on our pilgrimage to worship a mouse in the south. Feel free to clue me in further in the comments below. Oh, and the vacation was fantastic, fwiw, though I did miss internet access that wasn't filtered through the foggy and tiny lens of WML. I gots to get me one of them new-fangled phones that can browse the real web real soon now. Read the rest of this entry ...

§519 · January 30, 2009 · Google, Microsoft, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 6 comments · Tags: , , , , ,

Put The Students To Work!

I'm delightfully surprised at how much attention Mozilla is apparently giving SVG. First they've hired jwatt to work full-time on SVG. Now it looks like some students also have an interest in advancing the SVG implementation within Mozilla. Great!

I don't have the experience of a seasoned Mozilla hacker (only a couple patches years ago), but I do know that SMIL, SVG Fonts, SVG in CSS and SVG text-specific edge cases could use some work from a SVG 1.1 perspective. Hopefully they get in contact with jwatt, rlongson, roc, dholbert and birtles and get some ideas rolling...

§518 · January 20, 2009 · Firefox, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 4 comments · Tags: , ,

Houston, the SMIL has landed

This day was five-and-a-half years in the making: the initial patch to add SMIL support has landed on Mozilla trunk. SMIL is the Open Web way of doing declarative animation, I use it on my site here and there via FakeSmile. This Mozilla patch is partial support for SMIL within SVG only (not HTML). Note that SMIL support is disabled in the build by default, as roc says "we should enable it when we've got enough implemented that we wouldn't feel embarrassed about shipping it. " - but this is a significant step forward.

Thanks and congratulations go to Daniel, Brian and Robert! Also thanks to Erik and Ian for putting some SMIL tests into Acid3. Not that this had anything to do with it. Oh, no. 😉

Opera has supported SMIL in SVG for a couple years now. Anyone want to place bets on who will be the second to release a browser that supports it? Mozilla? Apple? Google? Microsoft? What, did I say something funny?

§516 · January 15, 2009 · Firefox, RIA, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 5 comments · Tags: , , , ,

Ubuntu 7.10 Dash Crash

I recently tried to compile Daniel Holbert's SMIL patches in mozilla-central. While doing this, I observed the "configure" was core dumping. The folks in the #developers channel over on irc.mozilla.org were able to help me out and trace it down to the fact that Ubuntu's dash was crashing. I worked around this by changing Mozilla's configure script to use #!/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/sh.

Apparently this crash has been fixed on Ubuntu 8.10 because Daniel himself hasn't witnessed this crash?

§483 · July 25, 2008 · Firefox, Linux, Software, Technology · 2 comments · Tags: , ,