With the release of IE9 and Firefox 4 all major browsers are going to support using SVG in the img element or as a CSS background image, which is great news as SVG images are good for high definition, scalable websites. I’ve written a couple of posts recently about using SVG with the background-image property, and how to cope with browsers that don’t support it. The method I came up with works, but is far from elegant; for one thing, it doesn’t allow for transparency.
Another approach we can take to the problem is to use JavaScript to detect SVG support. Alexis Deveria wrote a script which detects if your browser supports SVG and, if not, replace the images with PNG. It’s a good script, but I wondered if there was an alternative.
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My last post was about using SVG values for the background-image property, and I pointed out one big problem with the technique:
The drawback of this is that it’s not ready for use just yet — browsers that don’t support SVG in background-image will not provide any fallback, even if you supply another background-image value; so in non-supporting browsers, no image at all will be displayed.
This was annoying me a little, and I couldn’t find any workarounds that didn’t use JavaScript. However, after a bit of head-scratching I’ve come up with a way to get around it.
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While having a look through the list of features for developers planned for Firefox 4 earlier today, I noticed this:
You can now use SVG with the img element, as well as the background image in CSS.
I know you can already use SVG in background-image with Safari, Chrome and Opera, and this, coupled with Internet Explorer’s push towards SVG and the strong chance this will be available in IE9, made me decide to take a closer look.
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2008 was pretty exciting on the web, wasn’t it? The continuing rise of social media, mobile internet, APIs, frameworks… it’s getting harder to keep up with it all.
I won’t be so bold as to make any specific predictions about the year ahead — more of the same is my best guess! — but here are a few articles I’ve read recently which have an eye on the future.
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Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan has posted a few hints about new features expected to land in the next version (1.9.2) of the Gecko layout engine.
Allowing use of SVG in <img> and background-image is high on the list, apparently, as are background-size, multiple backgrounds, and possibly text-overflow. These features have already been implemented between Opera and Safari.
I can’t find any information yet as to when Gecko 1.9.2 will land; I think it’s doubtful it will make it into Firefox 3.1, so are we looking at 4.0 or an as yet unannounced 3.2?
While Firefox 3 is a really fast & usable browser, I was a little disappointed by the (comparative) lack of really new features in the rendering engine; that’s not to say there aren’t any, as there are plenty, but that Safari 3.1 and Opera 9.5 have set the bar very high in their latest iterations.
So that’s why I was delighted to hear about the 3.1 release of my favourite browser, and doubly delighted when I found out which features the team are planning to work on for inclusion in it:
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