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

On Sat, 10 Sep 2011 04:34:24 +0200, Alex Danilo <alex@abbra.com> wrote:

> Hi Ian & All,
>
> You wrote:
>> On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, 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?
...
>> Can anyone from Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Opera comment further on  
>> this
>> topic?
>
> I can't comment for any of these organisations but a few points:
>
> 1) At the Mozilla Auckland F2F Roc pretty much accepted that the Tiny  
> fonts
> as per [5] would likely be OK for Mozilla.

I think that's a fair summary. The SVG WG resolved at that F2F to make the
SVG Tiny 1.2 fonts mandatory in SVG2.

> 2) The SVG in OpenType is interesting but not likely to see the light
> of day for a number of years if ever

Yes, that is a completely separate proposal, and as I understand it it's
far from ready.

> 3) All the dominant mobile browsers support SVG Fonts now - i.e. Opera
> (which can also use SVG fonts in HTML content); Apple's Safari and
> also Android's browser since Honeycomb.

All the browsers that support SVG Fonts do so both in HTML and in SVG, as
far as I know.

> WebKit and/or Opera are highly unlikely to remove their implementations
> as other products depend on that feature (like iTunes albums for  
> example).

Opera will maintain the support for both SVG Tiny 1.2 fonts (W3C Rec) and
declarative SVG animations (the markup syntax, as defined in SVG 1.1
Second Edition (W3C Rec)).

As for the future plans for declarative animation in SVG, CSS Animations
if it adds support for animating SVG attributes (in one way or another)
has been chosen as the preferrable direction ahead. However, since CSS
Animations lack a number of features that exist in SVG Animations
currently, SVG Animations will continue to exist as a low maintenance part
of SVG2 (to maintain backwards compatibility), and unless there is demand
will likely not end up having new features added to it. For CSS Animations
to eventually replace SVG Animations the former will need to address the
requirements of all the stakeholders, and there was an action given at the
joint CSS/SVG F2F in Seattle 2011 to start collecting use-cases and
requirements for CSS Animations. The outcome of that may help decide when
and if SVG Animations can/will be phased out in the future.

Regarding XLink the SVG WG has resolved to transition away from using that
in the SVG2 timeframe, but XLink will still need to be supported in svg
content, even if it's mapped to something new internally.

Cheers
--
Erik Dahlstrom, Core Technology Developer, Opera Software
Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
Personal blog: http://my.opera.com/macdev_ed

Received on Tuesday, 20 September 2011 14:03:45 UTC