SVG implementations and DOM support (Continued)

Now, what seems a fairly innocuous method turns out to be really rather important. The method I'm talking about is getComputedStyle().

Depending upon the client your running this could be a method of the window object (HTML browsers) or more officially it is a method of the document's defaultView. An example:

 initialValue = contextNode.ownerDocument.defaultView.
         getComputedStyle(contextNode, '').
                 getPropertyValue('visibility');

The above example gets the current value of the visibility style property of the context node. If you stop short and just get the computed style object, you will receive yards and yards of style properties that play a part in the styling of the context node. Which is great if, for example, you are creating a debugging tool like FireBug for the FireFox browser. Which I might add is seriously cool and if you don't have it then your missing-out.

Now there are a number of uses you can put getComputedStyle() to, one example is when creating a JavaScript implementation of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). You need it when setting-up the initial values of style properties you are about to animate.

There are some other ideas that I've had that could use this in relation to SVG. But , guess what?
The Adobe SVG Viewer 3 doesn't support getComputedStyle().

Grrrrrr!