5 entries tagged smil and svg

SaVaGe Christmas Cards

Here’s a Christmas card in SVG. Don’t worry, though, I have also made a GIF version for those people who cannot view SVG yet. In this particular case, the ‘fancy’ SVG animation is 23 KB (I could have compressed it to make a 2-KB svgz file), whereas the GIF is 76 KB, and is a simpler animation (you get the blinking lights, but the SVG version also has the tree growing out of nothing an a very amusing manner). That said, the SVG animation needs more client-side CPU, and begins to get jerky on a 200-MHz Pentium-compatible NT box, so I have also supplied a simpler version (missing the background picture) in case that helps.

Alleged Tarot (4): The deuces

The fourth installment of this work in progress is the Twos of Wands, Cups, Swords , and Coins. For a while I have been debating whether the ‘pips’ cards should be decorated or not I happen to prefer the graphic purity of having the pips alone on a white card, like old eighteenth-century playing cards, but you don’t have to read much about Tarot to know thjat undecorated Minor Arcana are not rated highly. In the end I have compromised: the SVG version has a little blue button which you can click on to toggle the decorations on and off!

SVG interaction sans Javascript

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).

Alleged Tarot (20): Four Tens

This week’s entry in the tarot project is the four Tens: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins. Talk about being overcommitted. This set is being uploaded a few hours late, on account of I added some fancy animation to the Ten of Swords card (as with the other animations, this is trigged by pressing the small blue button at the bottom of the card—and uses SVG’s intrinsic SMIL-based animation). Hope this works on whatever SVG viewer you are using...

SVG slideshow, attempt 1

My virtual tarot deck is published in SVG, but the index pages are still in HTML, which is a problem for people trying to visit using an SVG-only browser like Batik. So I intend to make an SVG-powered index page. My first attempt uses the SVG image tag and intrinsic animation to switch between cards. This turns out to be unsatisfactory on two counts. First, it works by rendering the card and then displaying the result as if it were a raster image—on my computer that leaves the screen blank for some seconds while the off-screen rendring takes place. Second, the resulting image is not interactive—you lose the feature of the pips cards where the illustration can be switched on and off.