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SYS-CON Webcast - Think Fast: Accelerate AJAX Development with …
SYS-CON Media, NJ - You will learn how Appcelerator has been able to help developers create AJAX-based RIAs in less than 1/3 of the time, with up to 90 percent less code, … |
Maritzburg hold Ajax
Independent Online, South Africa - Maritzburg United earned themselves a point on their return to the Absa Premiership, thanks to a 1-1 draw against Ajax Cape Town on Wednesday night. … |
I recently ran across Inkscape, an open source very high-quality graphics editor that can output SVG that I’m blown away by. Even better, it runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. From the Inkscape website:
[Inkscape is] an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.
Here’s a screenshot looking at one of the samples, a vector image of a car; there are a huge number of great tools in this beastie:
Screenshot of Inkscape showing vector image of car
One of the coolest features of Inkscape is it can take a bitmap image, and do tracing of the edges to create a vector representation! Vector images are inherently more “impressionistic”; they are for more illustration type purposes. I decided to take this feature for a spin and took a photograph I have of myself and do edge detection. Here is the photograph before, loaded into Inkscape ready to process:
Inkscape with bitmap, non-vector photograph
Here are the results after playing around with the various options; on the right-hand side of the screen is the options dialog that you can use to fiddle around with the various settings for edge detection:
Screenshot of Inkscape with traced, vector representation
Now, I can save this into an SVG file suitable for the web. I could then edit the markup, or bring it onto a web-page. More on embedding SVG in a future post.
One of the strengths of SVG is that it is a file format suitable for exporting such things; while the Canvas tag is great for having a canvas that JavaScript can draw onto, you can’t easily export illustrations into calls to a Canvas as you can with SVG.
As part of the Open Web Advocacy work I’ve started with Dion and others at Google, one of my goals right now is to help increase awareness and support around doing 2-D/vector graphics on the open web. This includes tools such as the Canvas tag, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, an XML markup language for vector graphics), and open source cross-browser drawing toolkits such as Dojo GFX, ExplorerCanvas, and Raphael.
One of the big reasons for this is that 2-D drawing/vector graphics is the top requested feature by double the amount of other feature requests in the recent Open Ajax Alliance Browser Feature Wish List vote-off. As part of this effort I’m doing a bootcamp right now to come up to speed on the latest developments in both Canvas and SVG. I’ve been using Shelley Powers excellent Painting the Web book to find out the state of vector graphics on the web in 2008. During this education I’ve run across two interesting things.
First, I wanted to know what the status of SVG support is across the different browsers. I found Jeff Schiller’s very complete SVG Test Suite results that are actively kept up to date:
SVG 1.1 became a W3C recommendation on January 13, 2003. Five years later, this page records my results of running various SVG implementations (web browsers and browser plugins) through the official SVG Test Suite. Last updated 2008-06-18.
A screenshot with some of the results:
SVG Test Results Against Browsers for SVG 1.1
Things are pretty good with Firefox 3, Safari 3, and the winner, Opera. There is a strong subset of SVG that can be used cross-browser with these. Of course, Internet Explorer is the limiting factor here, with a grand score of 0% for all tests:
Internet Explorer SVG Support
This means that for open web vector graphics to be realistic we need some kind of shim for Internet Explorer (Adobe used to have a browser plugin for IE that had very high quality, but its quite large and was end of lifed in 2007). Internet Explorer actually has an earlier vector graphics standard named VML (Vector Markup Language) that can be used to ‘trick’ it into having 2-D graphics support that is used by a number of open source toolkits. However, VML can run into some performance issues when you start to get into a large number of nodes and animation with the available open source drawing toolkits.
One natural avenue is to emulate SVG or other 2-D graphics on Internet Explorer using Flash. I had always heard about this possibility but recently found a small company actually doing it to good effect. They have not finished yet, but their demo is impressive:
SVG Render Using Flash
Here we are viewing the source of the SVG being rendered by this Flash:
SVG Renderer in Flash (View Source)
I emailed the developers to get some more information on this Flash-based renderer and they responded:
Our SVG viewer and editor is not open source. It will be part of the new InputDraw version and with some more features - like draw recognition - will be part of the new Comics Sketch site, so users can create advanced comics strips.
We are part of a small company in Lisbon, Portugal named inEvo that works with a lot of web development, rich interfaces and other areas like computer graphics and artificial intelligence.
While I respect the hard work it took inEvo to create this and their need to charge for it, it looks like using Flash to emulate SVG is a valid approach for Internet Explorer and it would be great to have something similar available open source. Just the basic viewer being available would make sense as open source and would probably even drive more business to them for their higher level tools; it looks like inEvo has created lots of cool things above this that make sense as being commercial-only, such as an SVG editor, drawing recognition, social comics creation and sharing site, etc.
Top trio start Dutch league with new coaches
guardian.co.uk, UK - By Theo Ruizenaar ROTTERDAM, Aug 28 (Reuters) - For the first time since 1959 Ajax Amsterdam, PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord, the traditional top three in the … |
 Web Trends |
PBWiki specializes in hosting Enterprise 2.0 wikis for businesses …
Web Trends, New York - What is Enterprise 2.0? The easy answer is that Enterprise 2.0 is bringing Web 2.0 into the office, but that is not entirely accurate. … |
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was released today. There are several cool UI enhancements that this beta brings to the table that I won’t cover in this post, but you can learn more about them on the IEBlog. Instead, I want to talk about how beta 2 affects IE’s relationship to web standards.
First, CSS Expressions are no longer supported in Standards Mode:
Also known as ‘Dynamic Properties’, CSS expressions are a proprietary extension to CSS with a high performance cost. As of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, CSS expressions are not supported in IE8 standards mode. They are still supported in IE7 Strict mode and Quirks mode for backward compatibility.
In case you don’t know, CSS expressions were actual bits of JavaScript that you could run from CSS rules; this was commonly used to simulate the CSS max-width property for IE:
IE 8 beta 2 also now supports alternate style sheets:
Internet Explorer 8 now supports alternative style sheets as specified by HTML4 and CSS2.1. The alternative styles that are defined by the Web page author is available through the Style menu under the Page menu. The styles are also available through the Style menu under the View menu. The No Style option on either menu can be used to disable all authors styling.
In terms of the Known Issues with IE 8 Beta 2, the first is related to Ajax bookmarking and back button support and using window.location.hash to do cross-domain communication:
Internet Explorer 8 create entries in the travel log and back button for each instance of window.location.hash that is set. This is part of the behavior for Internet Explorer 8 AJAX Navigation. If you use this technique to communicate between documents, we recommend that you switch to the Internet Explorer 8 Cross Document Messaging feature that is based on Section 6.4 of the HTML 5.0 specification.
Finally, there are some issues with the onload event for IE’s XDomainRequest object that helps with cross-domain communication:
The onload event may not fire reliably. We recommend you use the onprogress events which continues to fire as the data is received.
Unfortunately this is it for this release. You can see the full Beta 2 release notes, or download it yourself.
On a related note, IE 8 Beta 2 includes cross-site scripting attack (XSS) protection:
The XSS Filter operates as an IE8 component with visibility into all requests / responses flowing through the browser. When the filter discovers likely XSS in a cross-site request, it identifies and neuters the attack if it is replayed in the server’s response. Users are not presented with questions they are unable to answer – IE simply blocks the malicious script from executing.
Finally, PPK has also published a post on IE 8 Beta 2 and its changes.
Maritzburg United and Ajax draw
The Times, South Africa - MARITZBURG United marked their return to the Premier Soccer League in promising fashion last night with a 1-1 draw against Ajax Cape Town at Athlone Stadium … Maritzburg and Ajax draw Ajax, Maritzburg open with draw Maritzburg off to a good start |
