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Vector Graphics Lead Wish List For Future Browsers
Coach Wei writes "Community voting results and a summary report have been published from
OpenAjax Alliance's recent "community wishlist for future browsers" effort. When the voting closed on July 13th, 222 people participated in this open community initiative, with 143 people voted, 55 feature requests being written up, and contribution from many industry leaders. The voting indentified and prioritized 37 features. The top 10 are related to vector graphics, security, performance, layout, rich text editing, Comet, audio and video. Among all the feature requests, 2D Drawing/Vector Graphics is clearly the most desired feature by the community. It received most votes (110 people voted for it), and highest total score (over 10% higher than the second feature request). Looks like that it is time for all browsers, in particular, IE, to seriously consider supporting standards-based vector graphics."
8^O
and also openajax alliance constitutes what we call 'browser users' on the internet ...
that alliance should try to make ajax actually something of use to the internet, rather than trying to shape future browsers to their preference by staging limited scope polls and then pushing it as browser community's preferences.
or, we can just kill all buzzword crowd and get it over with.
Read radical news here
It seems the vote was open to anyone on the internet, and only 222 people answered. There will probably be more people writing comments in this thread.
...who doesn't want cross-domain access? I'm perfectly fine with making server side code to parse whatever I need and then feed it to the browser via the local domain.
Am I missing something? Something about making a browser more independent of the server or something?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
I tought SVG is already implemented in most modern browsers...
Not when you weigh each browser by its usage share on home and business workstations. As long as Windows Internet Explorer doesn't implement SVG, and as long as Windows Internet Explorer has more than 50 percent usage share, "most modern browsers" don't implement SVG.
As an end user and a project manager, I'd have to ask you why your code doesn't allow such a possibility. Not that I don't understand the added effort and difficulties (okay, technically, I don't; I don't program for the web), and it would suck to have to make it all work properly, but that's kinda your job.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm glad Firefox has SVG and is improving it. I really want to see SVG animation. It sucks to use java script just to cause a diagram to have a few moving parts when animate transform would do the trick.
<sarcasm>Well, you see... our new, half-assed, pieced-together technology will only properly work if we force users to use it the way we want. Remember: it's OUR content, so we get to determine how the USERS use it!</sarcasm>
<serious>UseIt.com.</serious>
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Well, if you're using a decently made web app it's going to have opened in its own personal tab/window anyway. No history concerns that way.
If a web-app is well made, all is well. But this is going to be abused by those too lazy to make a good webapp. Anyway, if a webapp opens in a new window, will it ever have a history to go "back" to? Will the back-button even be enabled in that case?
I don't consider any webapp that opens its own special window to be decently made. The window I open you in should be quite sufficient tyvm.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
If you consider yourself a "web developer" and don't know how to manipulate the URI fragment to make the back button work with AJAX, then you should just quit right now and become a politician or a lawyer or something. The back button is fundamental and all AJAX applications should work with it.
There, fixed that for you. The only thing MS is ever first on are the things that can't be implemented in any other browser because MS owns the technology.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I do web development work. I'm not completely talking out my ass here. You do have some options.
Hey, that's a bit harsh, don't you think? I develop for the web. Just because I don't use every trick of the trade, you shouldn't try to call me names (lawyer).
Should I not call you a "car driver" because you can't do the Nurburgring in 8 minutes? No, because that would be silly.
(Or, like has been said elsewhere, just open a web app in a new window/tab. Problem solved.)
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Then I right-click the link to the webapp and choose "Open in new window". In fact, as a browser user, the number one feature I'd like to add is an item in that popup menu: "Open in this tab".
Maybe I'm drinking the Kool-Aid here, but I'm a little excited for Silverlight.
* Microsoft assisted with a Linux version, even though the Linux version is OSS, and the Mono guys own that code.
* Silverlight supports Firefox as well as IE.
* Silverlight supports 32-bit and 62-bit browsers.
* From what I've read (I'm a shitty web designer who only barely knows PHP and CSS) scripting in Silverlight is easier and more efficient than in Flash.
Adobe has zero intent of really supporting Linux, nor 64-bit. Silverlight is better than any alternative out there right now. So why all the hate?
If Apple released Silverlight, I imagine the community response would be vastly different for the same platform.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Looks like that it is time for all browsers, in particular, IE, to seriously consider supporting standards-based vector graphics.
Right. How could Microsoft, a company with 90,000 employees and a market cap of over $250 Billion, possibly fail to respond to the desires of a hundred customers who spent a grand total of $0.00 on Internet Explorer?
I think you need to go back to stats and look up statistically insignificant. Namely, 222 *can* be a large enough sample size, depending on the variance of the results.
Thank God for evolution.
I hope, for your users' sake, you don't actually parse JSON that way. If you don't believe me, just wait til a site passes you the JSON string "alert('P0wned!')"
Thank God for evolution.
The problem is the back button causes a very very very large break in the sanity of web applications. You can kiss a consistent state goodbye.
I know I'm contradicting my sig, but I want to explain why you are wrong.
Session state is maintained on the server, not the client.
If you trust the client to provide you valid data about the state of the application, you are very stupid. This is how people get owned.
As such, you should remember what the user was doing, and if they open the application again, return them to where they were.
Disabling the back button is wrong. If your application cannot handle me leaving it any any time gracefully, it is a piece of shit. And if you absolutely must have control of my system, well, that's why we have xulrunner. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the web is probably not even the best way to deliver an application of that nature, but you could argue that one back and forth all day - my main argument is that users expect web pages to behave in a certain way.
The real issue here is that a webpage is not a standalone application, and you run into problems like these when you try to make it one. Webpages are forms, like screens on mainframes, and are request-oriented. Your web applications should be the same.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That cross-domain security doesn't really solve a damned thing?
Remember the "Samy is my hero" MySpace virus? OK, the Wikipedia article calls it a "cross-site scripting vulnerability" but it wasn't, exactly. It was in the sense that MySpace was allowing JavaScript from user-supplied text to be sent to the client. But once inserted into his profile, it no longer crossed domains. It used AJAX to act with the user's credentials on the same domain.
Cross-domain security didn't do anything to protect against that because it was running on the same domain.
In short, it doesn't really solve anything and creates hosts of problems when you want to share data across domains. Yes, you can resort to sending all the data through the server, but that's fairly silly when there's no real reason the client couldn't access the data.
What really needs to be done is to figure out ways of securing the data coming back from requests, not creating this silly cross-domain rule that really doesn't solve anything and just creates problems. For example, "tainting" data returned from an AJAX request and disallowing it from being used in "eval" statements. Obviously there'd need to be a new "parseJSON" command to make up for that loss, but it would make receiving data from other domains safer. (Not perfectly safe, of course, but safer.)
Of course, that still wouldn't have protected against the "Samy is my hero" bug, but that demonstrates that even today we're moving to a web where you can wreak havoc without crossing domains.
I don't really have a "perfect answer" but loosening the cross-domain restrictions allows for new, more interesting web applications without resorting to same-domain proxy hacks.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
On one hand, you have a point. On the other hand, anyone who would hire you to write an AJAX application when you can't do this is not competent to hire you (typical, though.) This is more like not calling you a car driver because you don't know how to parallel park.
P.S. If you open a new window, and I don't need to use your site, I will close the window and never return. I prefer to avoid incompetents who think they should control what my browser does. Thank you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So basically, Canvas and SVG? Both supported by Opera, Safari and Firefox (AFAIK). In fact, Opera currently has the best SVG implementation, period. Best Canvas support, I'm not sure, but since Apple invented it I guess that could be Safari.
Clever signature text goes here.
That's splitting hairs on an irrelevant point.
Who was first? Microsoft.
It doesn't matter if it was done in ActiveX, as a DLL, or as pat of the "kernel".
At the time it actually made sense to do it in ActiveX... it could be disabled if installations wanted to do so.
What made Ajax at the time useless was only Microsoft was supporting it... so some Intranets could take advantage of it, but not the wider web.
Once Mozilla supported it, things got better... except we had to wait for abstraction Javascript libraries, because neither version was compatible.
Not a big fan of Microsoft at all, but they get credit here. Of course, you could also point out it was an "obvious" enhancement, and a dying Netscape was ill-equipped to match the feature even if they wanted to.
The point is still that they did it in a non-standard way. Is it really that hard to accept?
Pa-leeze. Anyone could easily load data using invisible frames to perform similar functionality years before the cute "AJAX" came along (I know I did.)