4 entries tagged
smil
and
tarot
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!
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).
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...
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.
