Re: Reconsider SVG 1.2

David,

so your suggestions is that all the SVG viewer developers should first 
implement new features in their own little chamber and talk nothing with 
each other, later come together and see what they got and what's useful 
to standardize? Then they have to re-write their implementations because 
they did not talk about standardization in advance.

That sounds pretty inefficient to me.

I'd rather prefer the way the SVG working group is doing it today. Also 
with involvement of the SVG content developers. Why shouldn't W3C and 
the implementors do implementation and standardization in parallel. 
That's much more efficient and allows constant feedback during 
standardization from the implementors. I guess for the implementors, 
talking with other implementors during implementation saves them from 
going to "dead ends" too often.

With regards to the CSS/SVG discussion:

I agree with the working groups decision to move along quicker. For us 
content developers the new features that are maybe beyond SVG and more 
towards application development, are very important. Sorry, but we don't 
have the time to wait until all minor details in interoperability with 
other (future) standards and implementations have been sorted out. If we 
would do so, we could wait forever and well go with proprietary 
solutions ...

If the web browser implementors would have implemented and contributed 
to SVG 1.0 right from the beginning, we could have left the application 
development side to the browser implementors. But now we have the 
situation that we have to develop SVG only solutions, because the 
reality have shown that proper mixed SVG/HTML solutions are some years 
away. In that case we need some of the new SVG 1.2 features in order to 
implement web applications that work in SVG only environments, without 
having to rely on webbrowsers. After all, SVG and HTML are both 
presentation layers. In my opinion it does not matter much, if the UA is 
an HTML browser or an SVG viewer. But for some applications, SVG is 
better suited, where precise graphics matters.

Andreas

David Woolley wrote:

>>For your reference we are in the "Last Call" stage right now. "Call for 
>>Implementations" comes _after_ that, so discussion happens first and 
>>    
>>
>
>I think what was meant here is that standardisation is normally about
>consolidating the results of independent developments.  A normal
>standards process is not about the cutting edge, but about taking the best
>of what already exists, assembling a coherent whole, and documenting it
>in a way that properly defines how edge cases behave (or explicitly
>leaves them implementation dependent).
>
>To me, SVG looks more like a product development exercise than a 
>standardisation one.
>
>In other areas, W3C has gone beyond pure standardisation, but in those
>areas it has been more from a social responsibility point of view.
>
>  
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 November 2004 09:26:50 UTC