SVG Navigable Viewport Part 2: Some Cross-Browser Support

So last time I presented a basic SVG viewport navigation strategy. I tested it in Chrome and it worked a treat. However, when I decided to test in the other browsers at my disposal (FF20, IE10), the nasty head of cross-platform incompatibility popped up in the strangest ways possible. I managed to add custom handlers for Firefox, but I didn't have time to look at IE10 or other browsers.

This time I'm going to try to figure out what gotcha's I have to solve to get IE10 working, seeing that it is currently the second most used browser. I would test Safari, but unfortunately the latest version is simply unavailable for me to test. I might try testing on Opera as well if I have time.

SVG Navigable Viewport Part 1: Theory and Frustrations

This is a continuation of my previous tests to try and develop a navigatable 2D scene using HTML5 and Scalable Vector Graphics. The features I want to discuss are:

• Panning the scene
• Scaling/Zooming in and out
• Rotating the scene

Some Tests with HTML5 and Scalable Vector Graphics

These are a few tests with HTML and SVG vector graphics. There are a variety of good resources available online on how to use SVG, particularly the Mozilla Development Network (MDN). This is still a relatively new area of web development, and as such not every browser supports the SVG standard, and many don't support the full standard. I'm going to be focusing primarily on the "nitty-gritty" details so I won't be using GUI tools such as InkScape to create SVG (a.k.a. I'm going to be writing raw SVG code in a text editor, or use Javascript to generate/modify SVG elements).

Some good SVG resources:

• MDN: SVG Documentation
• MDN: SVG Tutorials

Windows, NginX, MySQL, and PHP

Introduction

A while back I setup a LEMP server (Linux, NginX, MySQL, and PHP) using Virtual Box. This is fine for testing out how a live server might behave, or even for using as a virtual server if you don't have the dedicated hardware to host a server. However, for a server in active development it's a huge inconvenience as everytime I want to test out a change, no matter how small, I was forced to push the changes to the virtual server. To get around this, I'm going to setup a development server which can run in the Windows environment I normally use. I'm also going to setup the XDebug plugin. This will allow me to debug php code without using the "traditional" console/echo solution. I'm unsure if XDebug would work with my virtual server setup, but I do know it works with this development setup.