Is it sensible to dynamically generate SVG images on websites yet? - svg

I'm just learning about SVG, and it seems great but I'm not sure about browser support - have people successfully got around this, or is it still too early?

Raphael is a cross-browser vector graphics library which might be worth a look.

You can use John Resig's processing.js library to get cross-browser compatibility.
There is also Walter Zorn's (lot of DIVs) technique, that doesn't use SVG.

There is a new way to bypass internet explorer's lack of svg-capabilities:
The google project svgweb: Scalable Vector Graphics for Web Browsers using Flash.
It's a JavaScript library which provides SVG support on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

I thought it was worth updating this dialog because things are becoming more "do able" in SVG cross-browser. As someone who has implemented some (fairly significant) systems for organisation I have been "dabbling" into the world of "cross-browser" SVG.
I see the words "still too early" on a dialog started 11 months ago and I'm adding to it.
Please go to my site that shows some of the capabilities of Raphael. You can easily link to the main Raphael site there after your pitstop.
My website was implemented with Raphael 0.8.6 but the creater of "Rap" just brought version 1.0 from beta and that (additionally) fully supports SVG "paths"
If you want to visit the world of CROSS-BROWSER interactive/SVG in it's current status please visit these constamtly updated websites via:
http://www.irunmywebsite.com/raphael/raphaelsource.html

I'd say your best bet is to create the image in whatever format you're most comfortable with, then convert it to SVG with something like ImageMagick. You could write PostScript by hand or with a library, or directly create the image from simple text/shape primitives using the ImageMagick API. There's pretty good documentation, and you can call ImageMagick as a COM object (assuming your language has good COM support).

Adobe also makes an SVG viewer plugin that you can link to on your site for people to get full functionality of your site. Unfortunately, they are discontinuing support for the plugin, but by that time, it is expected that more browser support will be forthcoming (hopefully). Several years ago I worked for a company that wrote an entire web app using SVG, and we had great success with this plugin.

Related

How do I know if my browser supports SVG 2.0?

How do I know if my browser supports SVG 2.0?
(Apart from trying a feature that is supposed to work in SVG2 and realizing it's not working or that it works ...?)
From what I understand SVG 2.0 is still a work in progress with no full browser implementation.
For the more elusive features of SVG that may not be implemented by all browser you can check CanIUse to see if the feature is supported.
Asking if a browser supports SVG 2 is like asking if a browser supports HTML5. It seems like a totally reasonable question, but it doesn't work like that.
The best we can do is test if a browser supports a feature, rather than a version of spec.

How to make nvd3 work in Internet Explorer 8?

I am creating a dashboard project for which i am using nvd3 but as we know svg is not supported in IE8 so it does not render graphs/charts in IE8..please suggest how i can make nvd3 work in IE8
I'm in the same situation and I think I may just ditch nvd3 (besides no ie8 support, I'm finding other bugs). I'm wondering, has anyone successfully used r2d3 with nvd3?
My concern is that r2d3 uses d3v3 now, which nvd3 is not presently supporting (currently d3v2... d3v3 support in the works as of writing this).
For an alternative to nvd3, I'm considering:
MorrisJS!
- Works on ie8 (Raphael-based), but a newer project and less flexibility/options with the charts comparatively.
Google Chart Engine!
- I think this may be the way to go (for my project), I don't like that its not open source, but I'm already working extensively with the Google Maps API and this solution is very stable and easy to use from my experiences thus far. In limited testing in ie8 it works very well.
Also, here's another stackoverflow question on this topic, [question]: nvd3.js rendering solution for Internet Explorer
...seems r2d3 was the accepted answer there, but no one really verified it.
The library r2d3 is "a customized build of D3 powered by RaphaelJS. The combination of D3 and Raphael enable developers to easily build data visualizations that work in IE7+ and all modern browsers." - it has its limitations (see the link for details), but it would be a good place to start

How to build an shipable, "local", branded mini-browser

Since I don't really have a good idea for word to search with myself I’d like to ask you:
Is there some project, technology, w/e that enables you to build a 'browser' with a very slim ui. Just some CI and a customised "starting page".
I'm thinking of something like the Webkit engine (and interface) Valve/Steam uses for it's clients store page.
In what direction should I search for something like that ? How would one start implement something like that ?
Answers to questions:
We need this to provide something like a "Kiosk" application (for touchscreens) and shippable to our Customers. Running a browser in "full screen" is a temporary solution.
As of Platforms: Windows is absolutely sufficient for now, but Mac/Linux wouldn't hurt.
Prism looks nice so far but lacks the "shippable" part, e.g. I see no way of packaging it.
Take a look at Mozilla Prism. It's a "UI-Less" version of the Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine aimed at deploying web apps on the Desktop. It's also multi-platform. It might be fairly close to what you need, with comparably little work.
WebKit has bindings for many languages, is cross-platform, and is full-featured as a HTML engine. A bit of work capturing signals and calling functions will make it into any kind of web browser you like.
You could use Adobe Air, follow this tutorial and include your website within an iframe. That would allow you to build an executable you can ship to your customer.
Various graphics toolkit libraries contain some components which can display a limited amount of HTML. I've seen this in qt (a C++ GUI library) and in Java Swing, and have indeed built a tiny "browser" in Java within a couple of hours. Java Swing lets you attach a link listener so links can be made clickable and thereby jump to different URLs. Thus, my application could be made to work as a very limited browser.
This approach lets you display text, images and links; in the case of Java, there's even fairly good support for CSS styling. However, there's no simple way to make buttons and form fields work, and of course no support for manipulating the DOM or anything else done in JavaScript.

3D visualization in browser

I am looking for solutions for 3D visualizations in web browsers.
For now I just need to do research about this topic, i.e. I need to know how many solutions exist and which of these are good and why?
Thanks
Brief overview of 3D on the web:
VRML. An HTML-style markup language for 3D models that was supposed to be the amazing cyberspace future of the web, back when we still thought what the web needed to be popular was just to totally change everything about it. We were idiots. VRML is all but dead.
Java. JVMs from 1.3 can run the Java3D engine in applets. With the decline in prevalence of desktop Java I have yet to see this in the wild.
Flash. 3D-primitive support in Flash 10; libraries that hack it in earlier Flash versions, and provide higher-level engine features. (Papervision, Sandy et al.) This is how the majority of in-browser 3D is done today.
CSS. WebKit provides a perspective transform feature to CSS, which has been proposed for standardisation. Won't offer anything like full 3D engine features of course, but the capability to integrate with HTML content in the page is interesting.
O3D. Google's experimental 3D engine browser plugin.
WebGL. Proposed binding of standard OpenGL to JavaScript and HTML5 canvas. Of interest in that you can use it in plain JavaScript with no plugins, but it's pretty low-level. Currently only available in in-development browser snapshots.
Others. There are gaming 3D engines that have been packaged into a plugin, eg. Unity, and a few sundry proprietary-format model viewer plugins.
Open standard webgl,
if you are prepared to download a plugin - lots and lots
Nothing immediately leaps out for maps, a good place to start is opensourcegis,
Unity3D is a game engine that is (relatively) easy to use and builds to multiple platforms including the web (provided you install a plugin).
http://unity3d.com/
X3DOM is plug-in free, supports a lot of X3D (not prototypes) and is written in web browser javascript (where you can do all the prototype stuff you like). Cobweb is an ES6 JavaScript library which supports VRML2 (except collisions last I checked). Cobweb is plug-in free and runs in firefox. Both of these tools are written in WebGL. You may have to convert your event code to X3D. In x3dom, you may have to call x3dom.reload() if you load elements (X3D and Scene) programmatically.

The Definitive Image Gallery Engine / Plugin Guide

I want to get a good list of image gallery engines of all flavours: Stand alone, plugins for Wordpress or Rails, AJAX, no AJAX, using simple folders or a database on the server.
Please state what is needed (eg MySQL and Django) to run each item if possible. Thanks!
[I asked a similar question a while back but had limited responses. Hopefully with more users and a small bounty this will pick up more steam. EDIT - can't attach a bounty for two days. Hold tight.]
These are the ones I recall at the moment, they are all easy to integrate and they don't require much implementation to use. They all have a good and appealing design. Hope it helps.
Cooliris: Runs on flash, uses an
RSS feed to show the images
FancyBox: Jquery Plugin, you
just need to have create an < a
ref... arround the < img src...
LightBox: jQuery plugin, also
easy to use.
Photo Slider: jQuery plugin, as
some thumbnails bellow which you can
use to slide through the images
SimpleViewer: Nice Design, shows
thumbnails and images
HighSlide JS: Javascript viewer
I like Gallery the best of any I've seen. It requires PHP and a database). It can be plugged in to WordPress and other CMSish things
Take a look at SourceForge
If you are looking for a gallery application I recommend the open source project 'Gallery2'.
Lytebox is easy to use and very nice. It's enhanced version of LightBox.
Here is a nice photogallery using silverlight. Slide.Show is another slick Silverlight gallery. There are many gallery modules available for DotNetNuke, and an official module. There are also a great many available on Codeplex.

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