Getting In Touch

Last week, I published the first draft (and subsequent updates) of the Web Interface specification, which defines touch events. This is the first spec from the new W3C Web Events Working Group.

Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) gave it a positive initial review. Apparently, others thought it was news-worthy as well, because there were a few nice write-ups in various tech sites. Naturally, cnet’s Shank scooped it first (he has his ear to the ground), and it was fairly quickly picked up by macgasm, electronista, and Wired webmonkey.

I thought I’d go into a few of the high-level technical details and future plans for those who are interested.
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Recharging Roadtrips

Last week, Megan and I went to the opening ceremony of the first electric vehicle charging station in North Carolina, on the corner of W. Hargett and Dawson in Raleigh.

Megan wrote up a short blog post about it, and we talked about what this might mean for the future of our national infrastructure.

We have a Prius, so if we got an electric car (I like the Nissan Leaf, and not just because they use SVG on their site), we would probably use the hybrid for longer trips, so we could refuel easily. But in 10 years, that might change. Since it takes around half an hour to fully charge modern electric cars using the class 3 charger (the heavy-duty one), and 4-6 hours using a class 2 charger, electric road-trippers will need something to do while they wait. Megan mentions this in her blog:

Would owners of this type of business be motivated to install charging stations as a way to attract customers and hold them captive while their car is charging?

I could see a whole new class of businesses that cater to waiting customers, that charge the charging, so to speak: movie theaters, theme parks, mini-zoos, gaming parlors (multiplayer videogames or casinos or both), strolling gardens… activities that emphasize a more leisurely pace of travel. The return of the roadside attraction!

Here’s to the retro-future!

Translation Services at a Loss for Words

Text in SVG is text. Visually, you can use webfonts like WOFF or SVG Fonts (where they are supported, like in Opera or the iPhone) to make it look cool, and you can style both the stroke and fill to make it all fancy, or apply filters to pop it out or make it glow or give it a dropshadow, but it’s not just a raster image like many text headers… it’s human- and machine-readable text, as nature intended.

So, SVG is translatable, right?
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SVG Game Resources

Mozilla is holding an Open Web Games competition. I expect that many of the games will be use the Canvas API, since many programmers are more familiar with the imperative programming mode, and there are some games libraries that have been developed for Canvas or adapted from existing drawing or gaming libraries.

But I’m calling for SVG developers and designers to step up to the plate, as well. SVG has a lot of features that make it easier out of the box to build interfaces, animations, and even games. There is a scene graph, and the DOM event model that gives you free hit detection for pointer events, for example. And I’d love to see someone make an open-web game that’s both accessible and fun…

To help developers along, I thought I’d share a few free, open-source SVG resources that could be useful in building games:
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No Glee for Atheists

The theme of last week’s episode of Glee was religion and atheism. To their credit, they approached it playfully and even a bit irreverently, with Billy Joel’s Only The Good Die Young and one character making wishes on a Grilled Cheesus like it’s a djinni bottle. They even revealed that two of the characters on the show were atheists, which is an unusual and maybe even brave move, even if only as a plot device.

So, kudos to Glee for even raising the topic of atheism. It’s a topic that most shows, especially ones that take themselves more seriously, avoid like the plague. They even raised the problem of theodicy: if there really is a loving, merciful, all-powerful God, why is there such profound misery and suffering in this vale of tears? Maybe the lightness of the show in general let them risk pushing some buttons in this apparently very religious country. The episode was timely, too, on the heels of Pew Research Center’s recent U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, where atheists came out on top in knowledge of religion, and the atheist characters in the show certainly had the most eloquent refutations of religious faith.

So… that’s what I liked about it.

(Warning, spoiler alert!)
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Pointers on Background of SVG Borders on Mutiny

With SVG being integrated more and more into HTML5, both included via <object> and <img> elements, and inline in the same document, some natural questions about SVG and CSS are receiving more focus. This includes box model questions like background and border, and pointer events.

I’m interested in comments from the community on what direction SVG should take.

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The Map is not Proprietary

Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory”, reminding us that we shouldn’t confuse our mental models for reality. But maps, and data visualizations of all kinds, are really powerful, conveying complex ideas easily, and even shaping (or misshaping) perceptions about facts. This is one reason why decentralization of mapping resources and services is good; no one organization should control our common maps.

SVG is a natural fit for mapping. There’s even a detailed proposal by KDDI’s Satoru Takagi-sensei for tiling, layering, and coordinate resolution that fits on top of SVG, which I’d like to see standardized.

I’ve had an idea for a small open-source project for a while, which I’ve discussed with the brilliant Andreas Neumann of Carto.net; he’s been too busy planning SVG Open every year to help out with it thus far, and I don’t have the skills to do it without a great investment in time.
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