February 2002
This week’s instalment of
my on-line tarot deck
is the four Threes:
Wands,
Cups,
Swords,
Coins.
This week also sees a behind-the-scenes change to the way
I convert the simple
images in to the complete cards. Up until now I edited
the fancy image file by hand in a text editor using cut &
paste. Now I have a Tcl script that does this step
automatically. The idea is that I spend more of my time
drawing and less of it fiddling with the SVG code!
This week, just in time for St Valentine’s Day, my on-going tarot deck project reaches
VI. The Lovers
and VII. The Chariot.
The main innovation this week (don’t get too excited...)
is I have added a definition for the letter ‘v’
to the font used for the card titles.
In my SVG tarot deck, I could not
decide between drawing the pips cards plain or with pictures
on, so I added a button to toggle the picture on and off.
People using Adobe’s SVG plug-in version 2 have reported
problems with the Javascript—something about its not
understanding getElementById
. I did not want
to start getting in to an endless struggle to remain compatible
with what is after all an obsolete browser (version 3 is
available gratis from Adobe); I have enough compatibility
nightmares with HTML on Netscape Navigator 4. But it
occurred to me to try to instead use SVG’s built-in
animation features, so that I was not using Javascript at
all. I hope that I can thereby avoid causing trouble
on older SVG viewers, since they presumably will simply ignore
the animation elements.
More on
SVG’s intrinsic animations (XML.com).
An addendum to my rant about
Webclasses considered harmful:
Alternative web-application platforms (which I have not
used yet):
Cocoon 2: XML + XSLT
+ Java, with strong separation of logic, content, and
presentation; ZOPE:
object-oriented web platform, programmed in Python or Perl.
This week’s installment in my
on-going project to create an
tarot deck in SVG is the fours of each suit:
Wands,
Cups,
Swords, and
Coins.
Hope you all enjoy them.
What with visiting friends and misecllaneous babies in London
(not to mention the V&A, the illuminated float at the
British Museum, and the newly-opened Millenium Bridge),
I almost neglected to draw this
week’s installment of my ongoing virtual
tarot-deck project, which is two more of the trumps: VIII. Justice and VIIII. The Hermit.