From Accessibility to Zope

It's a well known computer graphics technique that blobby shapes can be drawn as the isosurface of a scalar field.

It's actually possible to create a similar effect using SVG filters:

The field is created using Gaussian-blurred circles. Where these soft edges overlap, the alpha channels are composited and this creates the necking effect which is key to blobby shapes like this.

The thresholding is done using a high-contrast filter on the alpha channel. The specular highlight was added just to emphasise the gooey, ketchup-y effect.

If you have a copy of Inkscape, it's fun to play with dragging the circles. Feel free to download the SVG.

I've just come across this awesome technique:

One of the reasons designers like to use fixed rather than fluid website layouts is because of the difficulty in providing attractive images at unknown aspect ratios. This technique offers a really beautiful solution.

The presentation shows that all that is needed to apply the effect is an image plane containing the priority of each pixel or effectively in which seam removal it is to be eliminated.

I demand that:

1. There be a PNG extension chunk defined to encode this plane.
2. Web browsers support this new chunk when non-proportionally scaling images.