Browser…​unplugged
Showcases of modern Browser technologies

  • November 3, 2020

    On being dumb as a developer

    From time to time, you get vivid reminders that your personal idosyncrasies get in the way of doing good work as a developer. Nothing new in that itself, but today it was me that got caught.

  • May 17, 2020

    The Web Animations API and SMIL/SVG: not there yet

    The Web Animations API (WAAPI) starts with the promise to integrate existing animation methods for the web platform into a single model:

    The Web Animations model is intended to provide the features necessary for expressing CSS Transitions, CSS Animations and SVG. As such, the use cases of Web Animations model is the union of use cases for those three specifications.

  • April 27, 2020

    Moderate between CSS and SVG for the path microformat with library pathfit

    In the last few years a lot of efforts have been made to dovetail CSS and SVG. There is even a resolution in the SVG 2 spec not to add any more presentation attributes, prefering instead pure CSS properties. Nonetheless, some parts resist their harmonization with a vigor. Path microsyntax is one of them.

  • October 10, 2018

    Who cut the cheese?

    The question was posed at stackoverflow.com in celebration of their 10th aniversary. Well, let's see.

  • May 13, 2018

    Animated calligraphy

    At Stackoverflow, from time to time the questions pops up whether there is an equivalent to the stroke-dashoffset technique for animating the SVG stroke that works for the fill attribute. Looking closer, what is meant most of the time comes to this:

  • December 8, 2017

    The 'gooey' SVG filter revisited

    Since Lucas Bebber described the "gooey effect" in a post on CSS Tricks, it has gained some popularity. But noone has asked more about the underlying filter primitives - presumably because they look so unintelligable. But that comes at a price when browsers have bugs.

  • August 20, 2017

    Shortcodes as custom tags in Markdown

    Square brackets are the most-used format for alternative tag-like formats - first popularized by BBCode, then used in WordPress for describing widgets. My new node.js plugin markdown-it-shortcode-tag uses angle brackets instead. Why divert from the known practise?

  • September 10, 2016

    Using svg-icon-toolbox for designing Debian themes

    The whole project svg-icon-toolbox started because I wanted to change the base colors of the new Mint-Y theme from green to blue. What I found was a jungle of virtually unreadable SVG files, pixel icons without vector source and inefficient shell scripts.

  • August 4, 2016

    A toolbox for SVG icon and style assets workflows

    The use of stylesheets with standalone SVG files is not ubiquitious. Browsers understand them, some renderers (like librsvg) do not. Workflow in editors mostly do not support their usage, or are at least not helpfull, even if they understand them.

  • July 23, 2014

    WordPress-Plugin crosswordsearch published

    Today I have published a WordPress plugin that has been developed as part of my current work. It is an educational game for children: they can develop new wordsearch-style crosswords or solve stored riddles.

  • June 3, 2014

    A Grunt task for updating existing translation files

    This post by Stephen Harris on the use of Grunt for Internationalisation tasks in WordPress is a lot of help. For the project I am currently working on I can gainfully use the plugins grunt-pot and grunt-po2mo.

  • September 30, 2013

    Drag & drop with SVG

    For the patience project, I had to fight some performance problems. Displaying a playing card as SVG grafic is in itself a completely harmless task for a browser. But as soon as you try to drag the card with the mouse across others, or when cards are displayed one on top of the other, as in a pile, delays get obvious; and the game flow is impeded.

  • September 16, 2013

    Good day.

    Welcome to my webseite.