XML News from Friday, October 29, 2004

Opera Software has posted the second beta of version 7.6.0 of their namesake web browser for Windows. Opera supports HTML, XML, XHTML, RSS, WML 2.0, and CSS. XSLT is not supported. Other features include IRC, mail, and news clients and pop-up blocking. There are lots of little changes, bug fixes, and usability enhancements in 7.60. However major new features include speech-enabled browsing (including support for XHTML+Voice), medium-screen rendering, and inline error pages. Opera is $39 payware.

The W3C Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group has posted the last call working draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2. Non-editorial changes in this draft include:

• requiredFormats test attribute
• requiredFonts test attribute
• "Various updates to SVGGlobal (formerly SVGWindow), including removal of documentStyleSheet and evt attributes, addition of screen and location attributes, addition of navigation method, addition of mouse capture and merging of existing new methods into the interface."
• Return type of SVGImage::getPixel is now SVGColor.
• Synchronization attributes imported from SMIL 2
• # Added background-fill-opacity property.
• Changed compositing attribute to clipout
• New Selection interfaces
• "Auto" textLength
• animation element for displaying animated vector content.
• Added "overflow" and "underflow" events for flow regions.
• Ogg Vorbis is required. No video formats are required.
• Event notification for shape changes, and event notification for rendering bounding box modifications.
• Mouse wheel events
• Two new methods on SVGLocatable for obtaining rendered bounds.

Kiyut has released Sketsa 2.2, a $29 payware SVG editor written in Java. Java 1.4.1 or later is required.