Re: Future plans for SVG Fonts and SVG (SMIL) Animation in browsers (Was: DOM4 not compatible with ACID3 tests)

On 9/9/2011 5:08 PM, Brian Birtles wrote:
> (2011/09/10 4:55), Ian Hickson wrote:
> > I'm not closely involved in the SVG work. Can someone elaborate on the
> > status of SVG Fonts and SMIL animation in terms of future plans for
> > browser vendors? Are these features that are intended to be phased out?
>
> Mozilla is not planning to support SVG Fonts (as per [1][2][3];  
> however the idea of embedding SVG Fonts in OpenType[4] has attracted 
> some interest including from Mozilla). That said, there was a 
> resolution that SVG 2 would mandate support for SVG Fonts to some 
> degree.[5]

It'd be nice to see a resolution to that bug report 119490, to confirm 
that SVG Fonts is dead as a UA-supported format.
We use it for basic interchange, and it does just fine. But we also 
render the text blocks in canvas.

Roc is correct, in stating that WOFF is a more powerful format. But it's 
also binary, and far more complex to
build, test and develop with for basic use cases. As is the case with 
most binary formats.

I don't see anything in Robert's post that warrants the SVG Fonts death 
sentence, but if it has lost its final appeal, it'd be nice to inform 
the family.

> [2] 
> http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/06/not-implementing-features-is-hard_03.html
> [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490

If SVG 2 is supporting some level of SVG Fonts, it seems 
counterproductive for Mozilla to block patches to their code base 
implementing it.

-Charles

Received on Saturday, 10 September 2011 00:19:50 UTC