Opera SVG Support
Sunday, June 25th, 2006After hearing about the Opera 9 release, I decided it was time I revisited the SVG content on this site to make sure it’s working with the latest browser-based SVG implementations. I started this round of updates with Opera as my target UA and I have been pleasantly surprised. Many of the samples worked and most of the ones that didn’t only needed a bit of tweaking.
Many of the problems were old remnants from the ASV 2.0 days that somehow survived all my past updates: using getFirstChild() instead of firstChild, setting the MIME type to image/xml-svg, etc. However, the biggest blocks of trouble were with my use of parseXML, printNode and getURL. Special thanks to Doug Schepers for sharing a snippet of code to bring parseXML and printNode to Opera and Firefox; that saved me a fair bit of rewriting. I replace getURL with much more in vogue XMLHttpRequest. Special thanks to Jim Ley for his page dicussing various uses of that object.
Not everything is working in Opera and I even managed to crash the browser in one case. Some samples like the games and textbox require keyboard input. Key events are not yet in a W3C specification, so I’m not sure how those samples can be updated. In other cases, I used ASV’s sound extensions so I’ll have to see if there are any good replacements there. However, all in all, Opera is looking very promising. Next week, I’ll take a look at Firefox.