I just found out that Joe Kraus has started a blog (he’s a founder of Excite and Architext) which tells tales from his experience on the other side of the VC table. Very interesting, all starting with the funding of Excite with Vinod Khosla.
David Hyatt weighed in on Dashboard’s HTML extensions and Apple’s involvement in the standards process. I have been impressed with Apple’s standards adherence and embracing open source in everything they do, (SMB, WebDAV, FreeBSD, KHTML, Apache, SSH, etc.).
I witnessed the W3C / Mozilla+Opera rift at the Compound Document workshop and I’d say that the WHAT-WG was the direct result of infighting among the standards bodies.
In my opinion, to suggest that Apple does not adhere to and support standards is shockingly untruthful to say the least; they set the example.
For one of my pet projects, I’ve surveyed the landscape of open source vector graphics libraries out on the net today. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
Smoke – The first one I encountered that uses OpenGL for rendering. Doesn’t implement a complete SVG set, but has some interesting concepts.
Cairo and glitz – Mono’s System.Drawing back-end (might be GTK) with glitz as a backend to OpenGL. A slightly different approach to stroking segments.
svgl – Not maintained anymore, but offers up some information on how clipping and gradients might work with a GPU. Does not stroke joins particularly cleverly, uses forward differencing for stroking segments.
Agile2D – Related to svgl, only uses Java2D’s path code and an unofficial OpenGL bridge. Pretty decent, however they were left wanting for features not available in their bridge.
Anti-Grain Geometry – Very accurate, however unclear on the performance / accuracy tradeoffs.
