RE: SVG 1.2 Comment: vector effects

Hi, Ian-

Ian Hickson wrote:
|
| On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Andreas Neumann wrote:
| > 
| > the browser vendors did not care about SVG 1.0 when it was 
| released, 
| > when it was simpler than SVG 1.2. Suddenly, they complain that it 
| > might get too complex. 4 years after SVG 1.0 was released.

Thank you, Andreas. I agree completely.


| To be honest, four years ago SVG wasn't even on our radars. 
| Netscape and Mozilla were in the midst of a massive rewrite 
| of their HTML rendering engine (Netscape 6.0 shipped some six 
| months after SVG 1.0 hit Last Call), Opera were busy with 
| Opera 4.0, Microsoft were busy adding their own proprietary 
| features and shoring up their CSS support; the Web Standards 
| Project was trying to get browsers to support CSS1 
| reliably... Personally I was at University involved with two 
| of those projects, and I can tell you that vector graphics 
| were the furthest thought from my mind as far as the Web went.
| 

>From the SVG 1.0 Spec [1]:

"The authors of the SVG 1.0 specification are the people who participated in
the SVG 1.0 Working Group as members or alternates.

Authors:
    John Bowler, Microsoft Corporation <johnbo@microsoft.com>
<snip />
    Scott Furman, Netscape Communications Corporation <fur@netscape.com>
<snip />
    Håkon Lie, Opera <howcome@operasoftware.com >
<snip />
    Kevin McCluskey, Netscape Communications Corporation
<kmcclusk@netscape.com>
    Tuan Nguyen, Microsoft Corporation <tuann@microsoft.com>"

So it seems that it was in the minds of a few people at those places. And
Adobe had implemented a plugin long before SVG became a Spec, so it's not as
if it was an unreachable goal.


| > I would be perfectly happy if the browser vendors would provide a 
| > full, clean implementation of SVG 1.0/1.1 and for now leave 
| SVG 1.2 to 
| > more specialized SVG UAs, such as ASV/Batik or others.
| 
| The problem is that whatever we implement, our customers will 
| demand that we do everything that the W3C has stamped.

There are many W3C Specs that Opera hasn't implemented.

In any case, you don't seem to think that people want SVG for any more than
the simplest of graphics, so why would they demand more than SVG1.1?

If you're concerned, why don't you implement SVG1.1 first, and see what
people say after that point. I will personally buy 10 copies of Opera on
that day.

| That's a self-selected group, 

...as are all Web authors...

| and is not representative of the people that 
| Web browsers would be targetting in so far as vector graphics are 
| concerned. 

SVG is clearly now about more than vector graphics. Please understand that.

None of us is qualified to be the arbiter of what people can use the Web
for, now or in the future.
 

| It _is_ an important group, of course, but for most users, 
| their primary contact with vector graphics is sites like:
| 
|    http://badgerbadgerbadger.com/
| 
| ...and I don't see anything in the graphics of that animation that 
| requires more than <path> and animation features.

Now you're trying to be insulting. While I love the site you reference, that
is not the primary use case for SVG developers. Nor would 'path' and
animation features suffice for the promise of SVG.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG10/

Regards-
Doug

Received on Monday, 29 November 2004 11:45:16 UTC