There are hearts beeding for me ;)

Dean suggesting living on a boat (oh, and congratulations, Dude! Long overdue I know). I think I'd smell of seaweed everyday. And fish. Keeping all my belongings in one place would be handy though because quite frankly I think I'm almost at the point of not needing any belongings I'm that used to not having them around.

Hopefully this will be the last move for some time. In fact, hopefully I wont have to move 'til my Visa runs out in 4 years.

I picked up The JavaScript Anthology last week and I gotta say - it's pretty awesome. Don't let the subtitle "101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks" put you off though - this is all using the DOM, and no real hacks. You'll be writing your own JavaScript library in no time after reading through this thing (I'd actually recommend using one that's already out there, but this book will help you to understand how they work).

I'll be releasing the alpha version of my .NET 2.0 Scalable Vector Graphics renderer in the coming weeks. Browser support for SVG still isn't fantastic, and obviously IE doesn't support it at all (although this is also something I want to try and recfity somewhat).

The point in the renderer is to allow designers to use SVG files in their websites without having to worry about browsers. How will this happen? Well the "Scalable" part will be lost in a way. The vector images will be converted to raster images and served as a PNG file (mime-type: image/png).

I want to be able to use CSS properties like "div#menu { background: url(images/menubg.svg); }". SVG is an XML format and so you can easily create images using notepad and not relying on Photoshop for the less complex images like gradients, icons, text (in the form of an image) etc. Check out someSVG samples using Firefox for a taste of what you can achieve with SVG.

I don't want to limit usage to ASP.NET applications though. There will be a web service that will allow PHP sites to call the code too and I may even have a go at creating a Wordpress plugin that will do all the hard work. If you're not familiar with web services the basic idea is that you - the developer/designer - can create your SVG files and when requested your site will send the file to the web service and that will send back the image in base64 encoding. This data can be stored on your servers HDD until your SVG file changes, and will then need re-rendered.

Is everybody with me so far?

I'll post about all this in more detail in the coming days/weeks. What I will be doing though is posting more about SVG to try and let you all know it's benefits and how to write the files.