RE:last call?

Lawrence,

"What can you say to dissuade me?"

The following:

"When is svg expected to be a w3c recommendation? This 
standard has been moving at a snails pace recently, and the 
release of two successive "last call" specs is disheartening for 
those of us relying on the new standard."

Why is it "disheartening"? "Exchange SVG" in the March draft was 
a welcome addition as it, among other things, gave a more data 
centric view of SVG, in line with the XML philosophy. Whether that 
really required splitting the language into two DTDs (and a main 
DTD that calls the appropriate one, depending on the application) 
and two different namespaces was questionable. In this sense, the 
June draft has been "simplified".

SVG is currently in a "Working Draft" status. Working Drafts are 
not "standards". (More specifically, W3C does not produce 
standards, it provides Recommendations that are considered 
stable for public use.) So it is unclear why would somebody "rely" 
on the "standard". Those who are interested, follow and contribute 
to the development in an iterative process.

"Because the standard has "missed" the development window for 
new versions of ie and netscape, the wide use of svg will be 
postponed by at least 2 years."

Mozilla SVG Project has been following the SVG development.

What is the basis of the argument that "the wide use of svg will be 
postponed by at least 2 years?" There is no direct relationship 
between a technology having been stabilized (say in a 
Recommendation/Standard) and that it will have a conforming 
implementation. HTML (4.0, 4.01) and CSS (1, 2) contortions in 
user agents over the last few years are well-known examples. 
Therefore, "stabilization" of SVG has little to do whether it will or 
should be supported in user agents-of-the-day.

"I believe that major players such as Microsoft and Adobe 
orchestrated this delay so that they could squeeze more profit out 
of their non-svg graphics software, and the w3c has been duped 
into this gambit."

A belief is not a proof. Adobe has been working on providing both 
SVG authoring (Illustrator 9) and rendering (SVG plug-in) support 
for some time.

Pankaj

Received on Monday, 17 July 2000 17:29:24 UTC