Seattle SVG 2.0 discussions

Hi All,

	I won't be able to make the F2F after all due to other commitments:-(

	I will try to attend relevant sessions by phone if there is one
available.

	Regarding the SVG 2.0 discussions, it would be nice to have the group
take up the "what do we do with Tiny 1.2" subject.

	What I mean is that we had SVG 1.0, which begat the modularized 1.1
which begat the Tiny 1.1, Basic 1.1 and Full 1.1 profiles, all of which were
upwardly compatible.

	Then we had a long drawn out design process that developed a bunch
of features for 1.2 Full, like text wrapping in shapes, etc. but eventually
completed a single profile - Tiny 1.2. Opera is the only mainstream browser
that supports the Tiny 1.2 feature set, however as we saw at SVG/Open last
year there are a number of other web engines being used in different areas
that use Tiny 1.2 but don't have visibility cause they're not browsers.

	For example:
RIM's Blackberry uses Tiny 1.2 for UI and most of the display as far as
I understand, a fairly large install base there.

QuickOffice used the Bitflash Tiny 1.2 engine for rendering of their
product which reportedly has shipped > 350 million units.

A number of (large) companies in the IPTV space are planning to use
Tiny 1.2 for their embedded TV offerings, and there are shipping
devices in some countries already.

	So, when moving forward on 2.0 - what do we expect as far
as backward/forward compatibility goes? There have been many slice
and dice F2F discussions over the years. Like or dislike of the uDOM
is a bit of a distraction, since removing the uDOM makes Tiny 1.2
very compatible with 1.1 - adding nice things like non-scaling
stroke amongst other things for example.

	Moving forward it would be nice to see a clear plan that
makes sure we don't fragment into Tiny vs. Full flavours. I agree
with JonF's comment at SVG/Open in 2009 that mobile devices should
support Full moving forward, but things like filters may not work
well with current GPU or OpenGL/ES or OpenVG silicon implementations.
So we need a proper plan that makes sure we can have a unified set
of features that can increase in complexity without sacrificing
compatibility (i.e. the interoperable subset plus extensions sort
of thing).

	Anyway, just my 2c to get you all thinking before the
meeting.

Cheers,
Alex

Received on Monday, 11 July 2011 02:33:16 UTC