Browser…unplugged

On being dumb as a developer

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 17 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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.

A Mine sweeping game

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 23:00:00 GMT

I started to dive into React. And as before, I decided to select a well-known game as a training object.

Who cut the cheese?

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

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

Animated calligraphy

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sat, 12 May 2018 22:00:00 GMT

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:

The 'gooey' SVG filter revisited

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 23:00:00 GMT

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.

Shortcodes as custom tags in Markdown

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 22:00:00 GMT

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?

Using svg-icon-toolbox for designing Debian themes

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 22:00:00 GMT

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.

A toolbox for SVG icon and style assets workflows

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 22:00:00 GMT

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.

WordPress-Plugin custom-logging-service published

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 23:00:00 GMT

Last month I forked an old and abandoned WordPress plugin.

Solve a Crossword

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 22:00:00 GMT

I’ve designed a few riddles for you. Try them out!

Build a Crossword

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 22:00:00 GMT

Try your hands at composing a crossword puzzle!

WordPress-Plugin crosswordsearch published

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 22:00:00 GMT

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.

A Grunt task for updating existing translation files

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 22:00:00 GMT

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.

Patience

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 22:00:00 GMT

Sorting cards is a popular pastime. As far as I am concerened, re-programming it for the web is just the same. But finding a solution with good performance prooved to be more difficult than it first seemed.

15 puzzle

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 22:00:00 GMT

This game seems familiar? Click on the tiles and try out your skills. (Tip: the empty field must end up in the upper left corner.)

Bezier Rainbow

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 22:00:00 GMT

In celebration of its 30th aniversary in the summer of 2013, german computer journal c’t staged a contest for browserdemos. My contribution, unfortunately, didn’t make it to the final round…therefore I’m publishing it here now.

Drag & drop with SVG

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 22:00:00 GMT

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.

Good day.

ccprog@gmx.de (Claus Colloseus) — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 22:00:00 GMT

Welcome to my webseite.