TedPage

Firefox 1.5 beta 1 is out today, with the most interesting feature (at least to me) being native SVG support. So I downloaded and installed it.

The first SVG that I went to look at I noticed two omissions, text on a path and that the <image> tag doesn't support SVG. While I understand that text on a path can be complex (in this case it was only lines, but it can include complex curves) the recursive image call is not good. Then I went to look at this SVG which is the demo file on GPS Visualizer. I can not get Firefox to believe that is an SVG file. It wants to open another application, specifically the Adobe SVG viewer. I'm not sure what the issue is, but Inkscape does open it.

Here are the bugs: SVG Image tag and the misdetected file. I hope that all of these can be fixed for the final release, I would hate to see a disabled SVG renderer be used 10% of web users. In searching through Bugzilla, there seems to be a lot of SVG bugs.

The last thing that I noticed as odd is that the menus seem to not be the Windows native ones. It looks like Firefox may be drawing them itself. I thought that the point of Firefox was to use native widgets for performance, perhaps they're heading back to Mozilla.

posted on Fri, 09 Sep 2005 at 17:02 | permanent link | 0 Comments

As interesting as I find the idea of blogs being the new media, I think that most reports are overblown. They're just looking for conflict and demise, and trying to turn that into news. But, we are seeing a new era of personal communication, or small group communication. There are now very effective ways for individuals get their message out, and have people find it using search engines. To date, nothing has shown this more than Hurricane Katrina.

Technology review has an interesting article claiming the legitimacy of blogs has increased with the disaster. Cicero has a nice article asking whether the increase in virtual communities has damaged physical ones, thus making us less robust in dealing with physical tragedies (though, I doubt most of the people seriously hurt by Katrina were surfing the web instead of evacuating). And there is a rather chilling letter posted on World Changing. A huge part of me wants that letter to be a big hoax, though I'm not sure that it is.

In the end, we all know that history will be remembered by the mini-series that tells it (or the thriller in Dan Brown's case). Will Katrina's mini-series be one of the Government coming and saving the family or will they have to fight on their own? We won't really know until a year from now.

posted on Fri, 09 Sep 2005 at 16:09 | permanent link | 0 Comments