I have been tweaking the formatting of the Alleged Tarot section of my site. Apart from replacing the style sheet, thus giving it a completely different appearance, I have also divided the pages in to SVG and PNG sections. Before this, the index pages for the different formats were mixed up together on the introductory page.
I have also enhanced the PNG index so that each thumbnail now links to a page with the big image and the same commentary as the matching SVG page. This is because I am now less optimistic that viewers can or will install an SVG viewer plug-in just to read my humble pages. Most of the traffic to my web site goes to that page, so it might as well have something more interesting on it.
I have made one other change: I no longer use
HTML 4’s object element to embed SVG
graphics in web pages. The last straw was Apple Safari’s
habit of crashing after visiting a few pages that used
object. The never-standardized tag
embed works consistently in all browsers that can
embed graphics at all.
This is very disappointing for me. In 2000 it seemed to be that
mark-up divided neatly in to 20th-century and 21st-century code.
In the old century there was HTML and (amongst other things)
embed; in the new, XML-savvy, century there would
be XHTML and object. I really
would prefer to use the object element, but when
even browsers written this year cannot manage to
implement it without crashing, then I cannot. If we take
five years as the cut-off point where we cease to consider a
given web browser release when making decisions about mark-up,
then Safari means the twenty-first century has been put back to
2008. Which is a great pity.