February 2002

What with visiting friends and misecllaneous babies in London (not to mention the V&A, the illuminated float at the British Museum, and the newly-opened Millenium Bridge), I almost neglected to draw this week’s installment of my ongoing virtual tarot-deck project, which is two more of the trumps: VIII. Justice and VIIII. The Hermit.

This week’s installment in my on-going project to create an tarot deck in SVG is the fours of each suit: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins. Hope you all enjoy them.

An addendum to my rant about Webclasses considered harmful: Alternative web-application platforms (which I have not used yet): Cocoon 2: XML + XSLT + Java, with strong separation of logic, content, and presentation; ZOPE: object-oriented web platform, programmed in Python or Perl.

In my SVG tarot deck, I could not decide between drawing the pips cards plain or with pictures on, so I added a button to toggle the picture on and off. People using Adobe’s SVG plug-in version 2 have reported problems with the Javascript—something about its not understanding getElementById. I did not want to start getting in to an endless struggle to remain compatible with what is after all an obsolete browser (version 3 is available gratis from Adobe); I have enough compatibility nightmares with HTML on Netscape Navigator 4. But it occurred to me to try to instead use SVG’s built-in animation features, so that I was not using Javascript at all. I hope that I can thereby avoid causing trouble on older SVG viewers, since they presumably will simply ignore the animation elements.

More on SVG’s intrinsic animations (XML.com).

This week, just in time for St Valentine’s Day, my on-going tarot deck project reaches VI. The Lovers and VII. The Chariot. The main innovation this week (don’t get too excited...) is I have added a definition for the letter ‘v’ to the font used for the card titles.

This week’s instalment of my on-line tarot deck is the four Threes: Wands, Cups, Swords, Coins. This week also sees a behind-the-scenes change to the way I convert the simple images in to the complete cards. Up until now I edited the fancy image file by hand in a text editor using cut & paste. Now I have a Tcl script that does this step automatically. The idea is that I spend more of my time drawing and less of it fiddling with the SVG code!