[clug] ACT Map i and SVG

Francis Whittle fj.whittle at gmail.com
Mon Sep 6 20:58:17 MDT 2010


As far as Adobe's test page goes,

        $ telnet www.adobe.com 80
        Trying 192.150.18.200...
        Connected to www.wip4.adobe.com.
        Escape character is '^]'.
        HEAD /svg/svgfiles/svgtest.svgz HTTP/1.0
        Host: www.adobe.com
        
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:13:46 GMT
        Server: Apache
        Last-Modified: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 05:12:06 GMT
        ETag: "28fe-4af4b580"
        Accept-Ranges: bytes
        Content-Length: 10494
        Cache-Control: max-age=21600
        Expires: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:13:46 GMT
        Connection: close
        Content-Type: text/plain

That's an interesting mime type for serving images with.  Firefox and
Webkit both expect SVG images to be served as image/svg+xml as per the
standard[1], whether compressed or not.
Furthermore, the Adobe site is not giving any indication that the stream
is compressed.  This isn't necessarily a problem, but there should be a
gzip encoding hint, and this pair suggests that Adobe were just too lazy
to configure their web server for serving SVG.  They don't even put a
clue in their embed tag:

        <embed height="212" name="SVGTest"
        src="/svg/svgfiles/svgtest.svgz" width="234">
        
Of course, who knows if IE 9, which is proclaimed to be going to support
SVG[2], will power through the brokedness anyway?

A cursory glance through ACTMAPi's javascript shows that they use
browser sniffing rather than feature detection.  I can find no
references to SVG or plugins, but then I didn't look too hard seeing as
how their information page states in a roundabout way that you will be
stuck using PNG if you don't have Adobe's plugin and that they are
"currently working towards making ACTMAPi fully functional by
incorporating the work being done on the Mozilla SVG Project"[3] However
this notice has been up for as long as I can remember – apparently it's
really difficult to do. 

Local or federal, it's still the government. For how long have we been
told that a browser-enabled e-Tax is in the works?  (An internet form.
In a web browser.  What a novel, bleeding edge, and difficult concept).
Well at least there's a PNG fall-back.

Cheers,
Francis

[1]http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/mimereg.html
[2]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/18/svg-in-ie9-roadmap.aspx
[3]http://www.actmapi.act.gov.au/customisation/actmapi_configuration.asp

On Mon, 2010-09-06 at 18:08 +1000, Brett Worth wrote:
> I'd like to access the ACT Mapping site:
> 
> http://www.actmapi.act.gov.au/
> 
> but it seems they only support IE.  One thing that puzzles me is that when it asks for SVG
> support it directs you to the adobe site for a non-existent plugin.  On the adobe site
> there's a test page to show if your browser supports SVG and according to adobe my firefox
> 3.6.8 does not.
> 
> If I go to another SVG test site though
> (e.g.http://www.croczilla.com/bits_and_pieces/svg/samples/) I get nicely rendered SVG in
> my browser.  So my question is: Does the adobe svg plugin that the ACTPLA/Microsoft
> partnership are calling for support some different svg to what firefox supports?
> 
> Brett
> -- 
> 
>   /) _ _ _/_/ / / /  _ _//
>  /_)/</= / / (_(_/()/< ///




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