or maybe something uplifting…

The SVG Open is shaping up fast. The call for papers has been out there for a while now but if you’re quick you can still present a paper or run a workshop but the deadline to submit for papers and courses is April 18 and that’ll be here before you know it. The SVG Open is the conference for people doing SVG. The SVG Open has been running since at least 2002 and seems to get a little broader appeal every year it runs. Look at the broad areas to cover: client-side Javascript toolkits, map overlays like Google’s, widgets in Opera, cell phones and other embedded applications, UI elements in Gnome and KDE, desktop tools like Inkscape. Those are just off the top of my head, that kind of a list just didn’t exist 5 years ago - not for mainstream applications like these. SVG is growing in adoption and I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon.

I’ve been out of the scene for a while but things have really come a long way all of a sudden. There’s some great support across the latest browsers - compare that half-green Firefox 3 to the qualified “about half of the tests passed that test features supported by Firefox” from a few years ago. There are solid, supported tools that make SVG creation accessible to anyone. Inkscape may only consider their release 0.46 less than a 1.0 but it’s a real practical tool that’s adding features in leaps and bounds. Want some graphics to work with? The Open Clip Art Library has piles of subjects covered.

There are more and more compelling reasons to choose SVG every day. If you’re someone who’s been applying SVG already then share what you know and go present it at the Open.

I don’t have a whole lot of time to test at the moment, but really want to see how the new Opera 9TP2 performs on SVG in Linux. Here’s an overview of the features from Opera Labs.

I just installed from the RPM over here. It’s not relocatable (with the rpm - -prefix option), so I hope it doesn’t mangle anything on FC4… The first things I looked at were SVG Basics and my blog stuff. My examples at SVG Basics don’t show up in the page at first. My first guess is that it’s because I simply used an embed on those pages, since I can browse directly to the SVG documents and they look fine so far. What’s odd is that if I view the SVG image, then go back to the page containing the embed, then it shows up in context properly. I may have to file a bug report I guess.

Text selection on a path isn’t there, but the text seems to be rendered correctly at first glance. Decorative text looks nice, the stroke-linejoin example might have something funny with it. Image filters look nice (colour matrices, offsets, drop shadow). My simple game example kind of works. Jeff stats look nice and I saw the snow on his blog for a bit there.

I wish I had the time to get deeper into this now, but I really have places to go and all that. I’ll have to wait until I can get back to my Linux box to do more testing.