Announcement: SVG 1.2 Tiny Last Call

Dear SVG Community-

The SVG Working Group is proud to announce a new Last Call publication
of the SVG 1.2 Tiny specification, available here:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/

During the previous Last Call, many comments were registered, among them
questions regarding loose wording in the specification that would lead
to interoperability problems, potential architectural incompatibilities
with other W3C specifications or existing implementation, and the
inclusion of specific features, as well as the scope of the specification.
Many of these comments were addressed before the transition to
Candidate Recommendation, but others were not sufficiently resolved, for
which we apologize.  During CR, we made a concerted effort to correct
those issues we had not addressed properly before, and learned from
direct implementation what other changes were needed.

Therefore, we are returning to Last Call to invite comments from
interested parties.  The Last Call period will run for 4 weeks, until 10
October 2008.  We encourage early review.

This specification has been rather long in the making, and we have
several vendors, organizations, and individuals with a time-sensitive
dependency upon SVG 1.2 Tiny.  In order to meet our obligations to them,
and to the SVG community at large, we hope to have an orderly transition
toward Recommendation status, and will work with our commentors to
achieve that goal responsibly.

Our Candidate Recommendation experience has shown that this
specification has been implemented and is appropriate for mobile
devices, and at least one desktop browser.  We believe that it is a
sound and valuable addition to the SVG family of specifications.  In the
past, we have stated that this will form the core of SVG 1.2 Full, to be
implemented on desktop browsers as well, but we are now considering
making a new specification, SVG Core 2.0, which would serve as the basis
for all implementations.  SVG 2.0 Full and Mobile specifications would
build on that core with specific modules.  We invite feedback on this
idea, and ask that reviews of this specification are made in that context.


 Commenting

We will be using a Last Call Comment tracking tool to make sure that all
comments are registered and satisfactorily addressed.  We will consider
all comments, but because of the state of implementation, and due to
market pressures to finalize this specification, we are constrained in
how we can address comments that do not pertain to changes made since
the previous Last Call.  So that we can make sure to answer all Last
Call feedback in our Disposition of Comments, we ask that only one
subject is addressed per email, except in the case of typos and other
non-substantive corrections.  We will strive to act politely,
responsibly, promptly, and in good faith, and hope that this will be
reciprocated.

You can register comments in one of two ways:

1) By sending emails to the list www-svg@w3.org, with the preface
"[1.2T-LC]" in the subject line
2) By using our bug-reporting interface (for which you will have to
create a separate account):
  http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/enter_bug.cgi?product=SVG

A non-normative single-page version of the specification is also
available for review purposes:
  http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/single-page.html


 Summary of Changes

We significantly tightened up wording and were more rigorous in defining
and linking to terms and other keywords (elements, attributes, and so
on).  In general, we held ourselves to a much higher standard for this
draft of the specification.

We did add a small number of features, such as the addition of the
'buffered-rendering' property for optimization purposes, and clarified
certain functionality, such as for the 'title' and 'desc' elements, but
did so very conservatively and only to match implementation or user
needs.  We also added new attributes for enabling community-driven
semantics, such as the 'rel' and 'rev' attributes, that pose no
additional burden on implementations beyond placing them in the DOM.

At the time the SVG 1.2 specification was originally developed, work on
the DOM and on HTML had stopped at W3C, and so the desired functionality
for rich Web applications, one use to which SVG was being put, was
included in the SVG specification itself.  During the course of this
process, renewed effort has been put into these area at W3C, and so the
SVG WG is aligning as much as possible with those efforts.  Some of the
functionality originally developed in SVG was split out, such as the
Element Traversal specification.  Other work was aligned to efforts in
other specifications, such as mousewheel events and client-server
communication (getURL and postURL were changed to coordinate with the
XmlHttpRequest specification).  Other features were dropped based on
feedback, such as the Connection (sockets) interface, and it is expected
that future SVG specifications will defer to the work being done in that
area in the HTML5 and Web Applications WGs.

The DOM Level 3 Events specification is a special case, however.
Because of its maturity, it was already implemented and deployed in
mobile devices while it was still a W3C Note.  That specification is now
under renewed and active development, and may be changed or extended to
meet the needs of browser vendors.  Therefore, the normative dependency
to DOM Level 3 Events in SVG 1.2 Tiny has been replaced with a normative
dependency on DOM Level 2 Events where possible, and where necessary,
functionality has been added to the uDOM to match what has already been
implemented in conforming SVG 1.2 Tiny user agents.  The SVG WG
recognizes that any incompatibility that emerges from this subset must
be superseded by the DOM Level 3 Events specification for all
future SVG specifications.  We anticipate that these difference will be
small and manageable.

Additionally, we have changed the interface structure of the uDOM to
better match existing desktop browser implementation and the DOM
specifications.


 Test Suite

In the process of refining the specification, we created a much more
comprehensive test suite, which in turn led to positive changes in the
specification itself, and which we believe will promote a high degree of
interoperability.  The test suite is publicly available:

  http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/Overview.html

We have already produced interim implementation reports which show very
good coverage, and we will be conducting another Test Fest at the end of
the month to produce the final draft of this implementation report
(pending any changes to the specification based on LC comments, of course).

Thanks very much!

Regards-
-Doug Schepers, on behalf of the SVG WG

Received on Monday, 15 September 2008 20:22:57 UTC