Re: SVG 1.2 Comment: Detailed last call comments (all chapters)

Dear Ian and www-svg -

People are wasting their breadth talking about the potential conflict 
between the 'filter' property name in SVG and Microsoft's proprietary 
'filter' property. It is over four years too late to rehash the name of the 
'filter' property. That property was introduced in SVG 1.0. The Last Call 
for SVG 1.0 closed in August 2000. Before this Last Call period, the SVG 
working group researched potential problems with the 'filter' property name 
and was well aware of MS's 'filter' property, and we concluded it was OK to 
use that name. Whether or not this was a good choice or not, sorry, the 
chance to object was in 1999-2000 when SVG 1.0 was in Last Call. SVG 1.0 
went to Recommendation in 2001. Because SVG was an official W3C 
Recommendation, many people in the industry went and implemented what the 
W3C "Recommended". Adobe, Batik and Corel all support filter effects. 
BitFlash supports the subset of filters that are in SVG Basic. Adobe 
Illustrator added a special feature to support SVG filter effects. I would 
guess that there are some embedded commercial SVG products such as cameras 
which also support filter effects.

The W3C can't un-Recommend just because one person (who states publicly 
that SVG 1.2 should be dropped and who states that SVG is not suitable for 
dynamic stock graphs) happens to wake up in 2004 and notices that SVG dared 
to use the same name for a property that was part of MS's 
embrace/extend[/extinguish] strategy for HTML.

Anyways, there is no conflict. MS's 'filter' property only applies to 
elements within the "Microsoft HTML" language. SVG's 'filter' property only 
applies to elements within W3C's SVG language.

Jon


At 01:44 AM 11/11/2004, Ian Hickson wrote:

>On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Philippe Lhoste wrote:
> > >
> > > 'filter' in particular is a problem. It clashes with a property that
> > > was in an older draft of CSS2, and which was implemented by IE. It
> > > basically means that IE will never be able to implement SVG in HTML.
> > > (A lot of legacy content uses the 'filter' property.) It also means
> > > that user agents such as Mozilla and Opera have to make a decision
> > > when they implement SVG: Implement SVG filters, or implement IE
> > > filters? IE filters are more widely used, but SVG filters are a
> > > standard. It's not always a simple choice.
> >
> > Are the IE filters so widely used? Except to implement PNG transparency
> > (which is needed for IE only anyway), I doubt it.
>
>On the Web, IE filters are more widely used than SVG filters, yes. It's
>not used as much as most other IE extensions, though.
>
>Some of the more commonly used filters are the one you mentioned for PNG
>transparency,and also those for flipping and rotating content. Most uses
>aren't very obvious, you just tend to find them deep in stylesheets (e.g.
>to rotate text in a table cell so that it goes vertically).
>
>--
>Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
>http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
>Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2004 14:07:16 UTC