A last minute change of plan (or rather, change of comic) this week – which doesn’t bode well considering this is only the second comic we’ve posted.
We had a different comic lined up for this week: one with an Easter Egg in the form of some animation. That comic was created a few weeks ago, and the animation was tested in the version of Opera that was on my machine at the time. Since then, however, I’ve upgraded my operating system (to Ubuntu 9.04) and installed a newer version of Opera… and now the animation won’t run 🙁
The intended comic will appear some time, I’m sure – I just have to work out whether it’s an Opera problem, an SVG problem, or some other problem… or just give up and post it without an Easter Egg.
In the meantime, have this offering instead. We dedicate this comic to anyone who is currently learning to drive. Luckily for us, we passed our tests before the introduction of parallel parking on the syllabus, so we never had to go through the grief encountered by the antagonist in this strip.
Esta tira está disponível em português brasileiro
This comic is also available in Brazilian Portuguese
Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French
Questo fumetto è disponibile anche in italiano
This comic is also available in Italian
Komik ini juga tersedia dalam Bahasa Indonesia
This comic is also available in Indonesian
Click here to download the SVG source for this comic
Instructor: Okay, let's try the three-point turn next
Our comics are released under a 
... which requires suitable attribution if you use them...
... and doesn't allow commercial use...
... and requires any derivative works to be released under the same licence.
This symbol indicates an SVG file that you can download and use under this licence
You can check if it’s an SVG problem with http://validator.w3.org
It’s not a perfect checker, but quite good
Thanks for the suggestion. The particular comic in question is an Inkscape file which has subsequently been hand-modified to include some simple SMIL animation. It will be interesting to see what the validator makes of the Inkscape extensions in the file, let alone my additions.
I gave the validator a try, but my suspicions about the Inkscape extensions causing problems were correct. With no doctype specified the file validates as XML with just one error – due to not having a doctype. If I force the doctype to SVG1.1 then it generates 298 errors, most of which are due to the use of namespaces on elements and attributes.
We’ve decided to put the problem comic to the bottom of the pile until I have the time to investigate more thoroughly. It will still turn up some time (if it comes to it, I have a version that uses Javascript animation rather than SMIL), but we’re concentrating on our less problematic strips first.
I’d imagine that’s an extemely difficult task… trying to parallel park a circular object!