Mozilla/Cairo (was Re: [Desktop_architects] 64 bit desktop)

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 08:25:10PM -0500, Mike Shaver wrote:
> But man, yeah, every now and then I put my head down on my keyboard  
> and beg someone to do out-of-process plugins for us.  We might get  
> another kick at that can when we move to cairo for our graphics,  
> because we'll have to trick the plugins on all platforms about their  
> rendering areas anyway.

Btw Mike, I've been dinking around with the new Firefox 1.5's SVG
capabilities for doing web interface layout, and I am completely amazed
at how well it works.  I did an interface mockup in Inkscape, pasted the
SVG into an XHTML document, and it "just worked" (except for a minor
font size issue, that's probably Inkscape's fault).  Kudos to your team!

    http://www.bryceharrington.org/mint.xhtml  # Requires Firefox 1.5

I think a large part of the reason it worked out so well is that
Inkscape and Cairo have been working towards interoperability for quite
some time, so a lot of the rendering issues have already been worked
out.  This has proven to be an excellent example of how cross-project
collaboration can produce benefits well beyond what you had imagined at
the time.  :-)

Also, I'm *extremely* impressed with the flexibility and power of doing
web interfaces in 100% SVG.  Since you can turn any shape into a
hyperlink by just putting it into a <a xlink:href> </a> tag, it's *so*
much easier than mussing around with imagemaps.  You can easily edit
your image (perhaps even generate it's SVG dynamically), and never have
to recalculate your imagemaps or re-render pngs or anything.  Brilliant!

Bryce