Re: Debugging SVG (and Firebug)

As the product manager of the rival Opera Dragonfly, I can't comment  
too much on issues with Firebug. It would be fantastic to see improved  
support in Firebug and other tools however. We on the DFL team have  
looked into SVG support however. We haven't fleshed out everything  
that we'd want to add for SVG debugging yet, but we have some ideas.  
DFL doesn't work too badly for SVG at the moment, but there could  
certainly be some improvements. The box model view in the layout  
panel, which is great for CSS doesn't make so much sense for SVG, as  
there is no box model. Other metrics such as the bounding box perhaps  
make more sense to show there instead.The element highlight could  
probably be improved in the same way: see http://my.opera.com/MacDev_ed/blog/getting-screen-boundingboxes-in-svg 
  for example.

David


On 2 May 2010, at 19:50, Doug Schepers wrote:

> Hey, SVG heroes-
>
> At my recent presentation on SVG at the WWW 2010 conference, I was  
> approached by someone from the Firebug team.  Firebug is a kick-ass  
> debugging extension for Firefox which lets you dig into the DOM,  
> script, and CSS, and even lets you walk the code with breakpoints;  
> there are similar tools for other browsers, and they are a healthy  
> part of any Web developer's breakfast.
>
> The question put to me was, what low-hanging fruit can the Firebug  
> team pluck to make SVG developing better?  I know I've run into  
> quirks once in while, but failed to catalog them.
>
> Have you run into any problems debugging SVG in Firebug (or any  
> other browser-based debugging tool)?  This is a great opportunity to  
> get these fixed (or at least examined).
>
> I followed up with him via email, and here was his reply:
>
> [[
> Short term: what fails when Firebug works on SVG?
> http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/list
>
> Mid: when a new experimental feature is added, does Firebug work? If
> not let's talk.
>
> Long term: typically difficult-to-debug SVG issues. This is harder
> since most devs think the bug is simple...once they have found it!
> ]]
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Regards-
> -Doug Schepers
> W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs
>

David Storey

Chief Web Opener / Product Manager, Opera Dragonfly
W3C WG:  Mobile Web Best Practices / SVG Interest Group

Opera Software ASA, Oslo, Norway
Mobile: +47 94 22 02 32

Received on Monday, 3 May 2010 12:39:31 UTC