Software can be like wine.  Let’s say, a bottle of red wine. How about, a Cabernet Sauvignon, aged 11 years or so, that you forgot about in your wine cellar.  You’ve tried this one before, when it was still young, and it didn’t do much for you.  Now you give it another shot…

You immediately notice hints of oak, vanilla, and traces of blackberries.  It’s a little much to take in, so you let it breathe.  You then notice rich tannins, and more complex aromas that you can’t place.  You look at the bottle, and read label: “Scalable Vector Graphics ~ 1999″.

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format is nothing new.  Created around 1999, this XML based standard needed to mature a little to really show it’s capabilities.  I’m sure those of you that have been around these interwebs a time or two have come across SVG in the past and were probably unimpressed.  With the web becoming a legitimate platform, and as the underlying technologies (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) and the browser have finally started to mature, the capabilities of SVG can now be realized.  We all know from the mass amount of shiny icons and “web 2.0″ sites out there that vector graphics are really popular these days.  But with SVG, the ability to use and manipulate vector graphics as objects is taking the web past 3.0, all the way to 4.0!!

Here are some examples of pretty compelling uses of the SVG format:

The Raphaël Javascript + SVG Library
http://raphaeljs.com/analytics.html
http://raphaeljs.com/chart.html
http://raphaeljs.com/ball.html

W3C Example w/ Code:
http://www.w3schools.com/svg/tryit.asp?filename=animatemotion_2&type=svg

One of the more famous SVG examples, the cubic spline tiger:
http://www.croczilla.com/bits_and_pieces/svg/samples/tiger/tiger.svg

“What about HTML5?” you might ask.  ”What about the really cool stuff that the Canvas tag can do?”  Well, there is some overlap, but SVG is much more suited to manipulating objects than the Canvas.   The way to view it is that (out of the box) SVG deals with graphical objects (vector graphics, raster graphics, text) and remembers what is rendered, making it easy to re-render.  The HTML5 Canvas is a lower level protocol that is basically a “drawable” region, which makes it very flexible.  One is not better than the other, they are just different mechanisms.  If SVG is a bottle of fine wine, the Canvas is a Cuban cigar.

If you came into this website expecting a post, perhaps adult in nature, you should be ashamed of yourself. Shame Shame Shame. Otherwise if you thought this might be some lame attempt at a witty post about the rise in popularity of wood textured backgrounds on websites, you win the UI trends golden superstar of the week, congratulations! It seems like everywhere you look these days, websites have started to shun the fancy web 2.0 ever popular gradient background (yes, I just threw up in my mouth as I typed that) in favor of using our bark covered friends as a more organic natural alternative. Gradients are soooooo 2008, wood textures are 2009! No word yet on possible 2010 background trends of fire or water, let’s hear what you think?

Each time you vote this UP a gradient cupcake cries itself to sleep at night

References:

• CSS Leak – 68 Using Wood Elements
• Wood in Modern Web Design – CSS Tips, Free Wood Textures and Wood Showcases
• TutorialBlog – 10 Websites with Wood
• Abduzeedo.com – Wood in Web Design

One recent UI trend is to have a website or application that seems to be stuck in a never-ending “beta” phase. Before you panic, here comes a shocker, you can usually tell something is in “beta” mode because the owner’s specifically tell you it is by slapping the word “beta” right under or next to the logo – this absolves them of any of their website sins like features that don’t work, any sort of testing what so ever, usability issues, broken links, you name it. Now I get that there are going to be errors and problems with any website, I just wonder at what point a project moves from beta into something more significant or this is just the modern version of the old under construction sign?

Prominent Alpha Beta Fraternity Member Fred "The Ogre" Palowakski Celebrates His Website Finally Leaving Beta Mode

References:

• The Museum of Modern Betas – The Top 100
• Wikipedia – Perpetual Beta