R121

See R118 — R122: own string literals.

SVG in XHTML??

Since Blogger peruses XHTML 1.0, the following shall display as graphics if your web browser supports XHTML and SVG natively. ERROR, ERROR! However I layout the XHTML headings, Blogger adds <meta> tags into my heading that are violating XML. The reason that the following displays a figure in gecko based browsers is that it nicely interpret the code as HTML5 containing embedded SVG:

It should look like this:

Preliminary tests indicate that it works well in Mozilla Firefox (6.0) but not in browsers using Webkit, f.ex. Epiphany and uzbl.

Mozilla Firefox 6.0β	Gecko/20100101	YES!
uzbl	Webkit	yes?
IE 10	Trident	YES! actually and surprisingly!
epiphany 2.30.6	Webkit	yes, but only if served as file.xhtml
konqueror 4.4.5	KHTML	no

It seems my troubles are due to the immaturity of most browsers, and their general unwillingness to adapt to web standards. It also seems that Blogger serves a lot of <link> tags that are invalid according to XML, making it impossible to adapt this blog for inclusion of SVG insets. It's just sheer luck that it works with Firefox.

The points of this experiment are

1. that Blogger shrinks the pixmap images that are downloaded under the assumptions that they're photos, not instruction figures (see dynamic classes for how instruction figures becomes), embedded SVG may remedy this
2. embedded SVG/MathML is the best part of the confused future HTML5 standard, and the only real advantage of HTML5, however deficient in comparison to XML embedding.

CompTIA A+

This week I managed to take a CompTIA A+ exam. It was tough. During the course preceeding it I got the following negative reflections about it:

• the system with English learning books and English examinations in Sweden counteracts the Swedish immigrants integration into the Swedish society — Swedish examinations should be in Swedish,
• the so called computer terminology (jargon) is the worst linguistic mess imaginable, where brands are confused with technology solutions, and there's no distinctions between adapters, adapted wires/connections, or technology, everything termed with three letter abbreviations,
• one cannot explain problems to the customers using the "established" computer jargon — there's a very distinct need to educate computer professionals in presentation techniques for customers and end users.

The course itself then? Well, pretty different from university courses. I learnt a lot about the basics that is important for a computer professional. The coverage was PC and basic Windows from a problem solving perspective, but not so much about the fundamental workings of the computer and the operating system. There was nothing about Linux – that's another cram course.