SVG Tiny 1.2 should be returned for further work

Dear Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group,

  Please report to the Director my formal objection to the Working
Group's decision to publish the latest SVG Tiny 1.2 Working Draft,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-SVGMobile12-20050413/text.html>, as
Last Call Working Draft. I think it is necessary that the document
is returned to the Working Group for further work.

In response to the previous Last Call announcement for SVG 1.2,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/>, I have registered
my concern that too many issues raised against previous drafts and
dependencies of SVG 1.2 have been ignored by the Working Group and
the draft in general was too incomplete to receive adequate review,
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Oct/0100.html>.

I gave a specific example for the latter, the Socket Connection
interface, <http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/api#socket>.
The feature received considerable review anyway,

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Sep/0094.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Oct/0144.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Nov/0065.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2005Jan/0004.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2005Feb/0090.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Nov/thread.html#17

Working Group participants even agreed that the feature is not
adequately defined in the draft

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Nov/0430.html

and reviewers even provided more adequate text for the draft,

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Nov/0481.html

The Working Group however ignored all this feedback, the latest
draft contains essentially same description,

  http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-SVGMobile12-20050413/svgudom.html#global::Connection

which still can't be reviewed properly and reviewers would just
raise already known issues anyway.

This is just one example of a great many of issues that have been
ignored by the Working Group, which continue to be issues in the
latest Last Call Working Draft. Thus, regardless of whether it is
acceptable to publish a Last Call announcement without formally
addressing all comments on previous drafts first, and with many
open issues, the technical quality of the draft greatly suffers
from this (which clearly is not acceptable). I nevertheless think
and have pointed out to the Working Group that this is hardly
acceptable,

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Nov/0274.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2005Mar/0063.html

In addition to the many issues not addressed in the draft, it
introduces many new problems previous drafts did not have. The
draft is in a rather poor shape, even most basic quality
assurance has not been done, many examples in the draft are
not well-formed, not namespace well-formed, not conforming,
etc., many normative references are outdated or incorrect, much
of the syntax definitions depends on undefined symbols, and so
on, even though it took the Working Group eight months to publish
this draft (and I note that the Working Group's charter requires
much more regular updates anyway).

I am further concerned that through pushing SVG Tiny 1.2 to
Candidate Recommendation status before SVG 1.2 is reasonably
stable as well as the missing discussion of many aspects of the
SVG 1.2 processing model from the SVG Tiny 1.2 draft, design
issues that affect SVG Tiny 1.2 (even though Tiny might not have
all the relevant features) might be missed; for example, the
Trait Access feature in SVG 1.2 failed to define processing
in the context of CSS and XML namespaces

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2005Mar/0053.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2005Apr/0012.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2005Apr/0016.html

I think without this information the feature cannot be properly
reviewed, and it is thus not possible to determine whether the
subset of this feature defined in SVG Tiny 1.2 is indeed a good
one. This is just an example of course, there are other features
for which I have similar concerns.

Review of the latest draft is further complicated by the lack of
adequate review material, no diff-versions have been provided and
the http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-SVGMobile12-20050413/changes.html
list of changes that was provided is very incomplete, e.g. the
new draft adds features to the TraitAccess interface to access the
presentation values of traits, yet this change is not listed; other
things are noted in the list of changes like flattening of child
elements for editable text, but no such changes have been made.

Popular requests for PDF or single-document HTML versions as the
Working Group received for the previous last call aswell has been
ignored so far aswell.

It even seems the Working Group does not have intentions to address
the comments on previous drafts at all, the Last Call announcement,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2005Apr/0058, indicates
that "This is no longer required, since we have moved to a second
Last Call instead".

If the Working Group formally addresses all these comments now and
updates the draft accordingly, I think these changes would have to
be considered substantial, due to both the number of changes as well
as their technical impact. The Process document would then require
the Director to return the document to the Working Group; I think
this is indeed the only way to ensure adequate technical review of
and broad consensus about SVG 1.2.

Thanks,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Sunday, 24 April 2005 17:27:59 UTC