Friday 4 April 2008

OverTheAir: WICD -- Daniel Herzog (Vodafone)

Two profiles: WICD Full & WICD Mobile. Full gives you SVG full and full XHTML, CSS & EcmaScript.

Mobile requires EcmaScript 3rd edition Compact Mobile (no eval) as well as CSS & XHTML

Browsers that support it:

  • Opera 9.5 beta 1
  • Safari 3.1
  • Firefox 3 beta 5 (though not officially, yet)

Big feature in WICD SVG is rightsizing

  • if the browser just defines the width as a percentage
  • go ask the SVG for its aspect ratio
  • assign the height appropriately

WICD also includes media queries. These include things such as dpi which can be very useful on smaller devices. Opera will update media queries in real-time when resizing the browser window :-)

Can interact with SVG and XHTML — e.g. hover over a link and get the SVG to respond immediately; also create SVG animated circular radius over a clicked point on a google map.

SVG has Javascript within it so can encapsulate functions within. Can then address each object’s methods from javascript in the XHTML page.

SVG:

Object.prototype.myAnim = new animatorClass();

XHTML Javascript:

document.objectOfTypeMyAnim.animatorClassMethod(params)

At the moment, designers have Illustrator to create static images. Animations are harder to create. Debugging is now easier using Firebug. There’s another tool called Inkscape available for Linux, Mac & Windows. It’s getting better all the time.

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