Musings

The March of Technology

Back when Evan Goer did his XHTML 100 survey, it was depressingly clear that sites which did XHTML correctly were not exactly thick on the ground.

But now, four months later, there are some rays of hope.

• Evan’s list of X-Philes grows longer by the day.
• Some top-drawer geek weblogs are planning to convert to application/xhtml+xml.
• And some far-sighted individuals are talking about comment validation, etc.

Now, as you know, we here at Musings pride ourselves on having the world’s most technologically-advanced weblog. With all these rumblings of progress, we can’t exactly sit still, can we? So what to do?

Kick it up a notch!

Go to the previous post and hit the “Text Zoom” button in your browser. The equations rescale nicely along with the text. But you knew that already: it’s because we’re using MathML (converted automatically from LaTeX source) rather than crufty little GIF images for the equations.

But notice the figures. They rescale too. Whoa! That’s because Musings is now SVG-enabled. If you have Adobe’s plugin or a natively SVG-capable browser, you should be getting all the modern goodness. If not, you should get an old-skool GIF image instead. I haven’t tested this on a wide variety of browsers, but in my limited testing (with the Adobe plugin) it seems to work well.

Update (8/23/2003): Just to be clear (since this was the subject of some confusion), we’re not sticking SVG inline. Rather, we’re including it via the <object> tag. This makes it accessible to Adobe’s plugin and allows for graceful fallback (in this case, to a GIF image) for those whose browsers can’t handle SVG. The world just isn’t ready for inline SVG. Yet…

Update (9/3/2003): OK, my secrets are revealed here. Enjoy!