Svg

Mozilla just opened the new source repository (mozilla-central) meaning the next release features will start landing. David Baron posted about landing new CSS selectors. Robert O’Callahan posted about some kick-ass SVG-based CSS effects used to style HTML. This totally rocks and will help push SVG into more of a leading role on the Web.

Adobe’s Ryan Stewart has a post on the friction between Open Web advocates and “RIA vendors”. I think Ryan does a good job describing the work being done at Adobe (and Microsoft) to become active in a larger ecosystem, namely open source and cross-platform. There are a couple bits I want to respond (emphasis mine):

I was clickety-clicking my way around the Internet and came across the Connected Ventures website. The first thing that I noticed was the “bubble menu” system used on the site. Then I noticed it was written in Flash. Surely, I thought, SVG could be used to create bubble menus too.

SVG is a nice way to create vector graphics on the web and even embedded in HTML pages. Sometimes you might embed other markup into SVG and that’s where foreignObject comes in. From the W3 SVG1.1 spec:

I am always interested to see other people use some of my code in a new way. Therefore, I was pretty happy to see a demo of my RichDraw VML/SVG editor hooked up to some really cool XMPP/Jabber collaboration code.

I was a little surprised how “popular” my XUL/E post became. The demo viewer page alone has over double the hits of the second place page. In that post, I demonstrated how Mozilla’s rendering engine (Gecko) could be embedded in Internet Explorer and used to display rich XUL applications and advanced SVG and canvas graphics. Of course, XUL/E is a play on Microsoft’s brand-new-fantastic-sliced-bread WPF/E technology and Mozilla is not mounting a XUL/E initiative (but I can dare to dream).

WPF is the coolest thing an MFC programmer has ever seen. Of course, developers who have been working with declarative markups (HTML, SVG, XUL or Laszlo) and RAD form builders (Delphi and VB) are not hyperventilating. Sure, its nice that Microsoft has introduced a development platform that is actually easy to use, but such platforms have been around a while. Now, WPF/E is ready to take rich internet application (RIA) development by storm. Its not the first (XUL, Flash, Flex and Laszlo are not betas), but Microsoft’s entry is not to be taken lightly.