Lots of coffee, no cigarettes

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:24:00 +0000

They want to take away our coffee machine! First they took our predecessors' sofa, and now this. This is outrageous. Waaaaiiiit… maybe I should start at the beginning. Maybe I should start by telling you who “we” are.

The final two years of Gymnasium in the classic, soon to have been replaced, Bavarian school system is the Kollegstufe. That's like sixth form, for all you English readers. “We” are the Kollegstufe at my school, and, some time in the previous semester, we were granted the luxury of being allowed to use a disused classroom for, on paper, studying, after having complained about not fitting into the corridors for years. Since then, we have turned it into quite a pleasant sitting room which has even managed to remain, for me at least, the best place in the building for actually studying, if only because we got hold of the most comfortable chairs far and wide.

In the region, it is traditional to have a gigantic party after the Abitur exams. An expensive party. So, as Kollegstufe, we organize legendary (for-profit) parties and whatever else we can think of that gets us money. Ergo, we have a budget. A budget that one could put to good use, one that could be used to finance a coffee machine. Best idea ever. What we bought is a Senseo-brand coffee pod machine—a system that works well and produces good coffee that costs less than 9 cents Eurocents, that is per cup, assuming you buy your pods from ALDI.

Naturally, there are quite a few students now that use the machine quite a lot, and drink quite a lot of coffee. It's great, we love it, and are probably addicted. There's always a great atmosphere in that room. Not surprisingly, there is a group of “regulars” that seem to always have a cup, or at least pod, of coffee on themselves. Interestingly, this group consists mostly of art students. And myself of course. Students of physics (sleepless geek zombies?), French (goes well with café) and, well, German, are also good candidates for coffee drinking. But—enough of that.

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Where's that web SVG support ?

nospam@example.com (Thomas Jollans) — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:34:34 +0000

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are a promising technology. We've all known for years that vector graphics are, scalable as they tend to be, a great thing and often more useful than raster-based image formats. SVG in particular is nice because it's

all text
an XML-based format, and thus hip in the industry
an open format
an open XML-based format, and thus portable and good with stuff like XSL-T.

Web browsers like to boast about their SVG support, it being a hip technology pushed as a web standard by the W³C, and the support isn't bad. Recent versions of Gecko (Firefox etc), Opera, KHTML and WebKit have all implemented a working subset of SVG and are able to display simple images correctly. Some browsers (at least Firefox and Opera) have decent support for XSL-T style sheets, allowing you to display an XML data sheet graphically in a browser by linking a suitable style sheet at the top — I never expected this, but I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that last year. Also interesting is the support of ECMAScript within SVG, making it possible to play tetris in a vanilla IceWeasel.

What was this stuff called again?

We're talking about scalable vector graphics within a WWW context. The fact that these things are scalable could be used to our advantage, n'est-ce pas ? Let's say you have a website styled with only ems for measuring distance, no pixels or other absolute stuff. Being nice and accessible, having the whole website scale when you hit Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-. Something like <img src="foo.svgz" alt="An illustration of bar" style="width:20em"/> should be just what you need. So, which browser supports that ? Bingo, not a single one !

There is a standard, portable way to include SVG in websites: you use the <object> tag, like so: <object type="image/svg+xml" data="foo.svgz" ...>. This works in pretty much all modern browsers (if you don't count IE7, but why would anyone call that bastard “modern” ?), but it doesn't do what I want it to do: it doesn't scale the graphic. At all. It stubbornly uses the size in the SVG file. If you're lucky, zooming with change the font size in the image, but only the font. What's the point of that, I ask you ? Why bother with scalable vector graphics support if you can't scale them ? Maybe we should call them scriptable vector graphics when using them on the web...

JollyBOX blog - rant

Lots of coffee, no cigarettes

Where's that web SVG support ?

What was this stuff called again?