Late Night PC

I was thinking over the SVG lighting examples that I presented over the weekend and I wanted a clean way to produce something more complex that utilizes the lighting effect that I came up with. Examples are easiest to learn from when the information can be presented in small chunks. I think that logic carries through to code analysis. If there's no good reason to make big long functions then I stick to what fits on my screen. That's very developer-centric of me, but I am a developer.

So the way that I know to keep things small when it comes to XML is XSLT. That might sound backwards since XSLT and XML can be very verbose, but what I mean is that units can be independently analyzed. Large and complicated functionality can be elegantly composed from many small blocks. Chunks of code that I've produced with XSLT tend to be quite digestable - so far.

Your computer is gone.

How are you going to publish your game? Your article? Your website? What's your email password? Where's your address book? The raw photos you used to make that great picture that got so many views on flickr? What's your password for flickr?

I've been doing some playing around with SVG effects that can be achieved without filters. I started playing because the build of Firefox (Deer Park Alpha 2) that I'm using doesn't have them built-in. There's work under way and a patch is available if you build from source.

There are better reasons for faking lighting though. Filters are resource intensive and sometimes you don't care about realistic lighting so much as just a way to make something shiny (or shadowed). The comparable filter to what I'm talking about today is fePointLight.

My simple example is lighting a circle to make it look more like a sphere. I have a few goals:

1. I don't want the effect to depend on the colours of the underlying shape.
2. I want to end up with something that works for as wide a range of shapes as possible.
3. I want to be able to adjust the intensity and position of my fake light at least a little bit and with out too much work.

I've already done some of this, so I know I'll be at least partly successful (and it explains my mixed tense). Let's start with a simple circle.

Kurt Cagle has posted a summary of his keynote speech from SVG Open 2005. He covers a lot of ground on XML and the next generation of GUI. Pretty inspiring stuff as an SVG enthusiast. The amazing part is that even though we've all been hearing about subscribing to software since the 90's, this time I can see it coming. Not soon like next month, but soon like in a couple years.