Re: SVG Fonts [...]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:01 PM, Dirk Schulze <vbs85@gmx.de> wrote:

> The current specification require SVG Fonts, so a viewer without SVG
> Fonts support is not a SVG compliant viewer.
>

That's true, but "it's in a spec" isn't a good reason to add a feature
either. Otherwise we'd all be implementing XSL-FO :-).

Am Donnerstag, den 03.06.2010, 19:34 +1200 schrieb Robert O'Callahan:
>
> The problem is, SVG Fonts 1.1 is easy to implement except for the part
> > where you allow arbitrary SVG content in each glyph. As far as I can
> > tell, that is actually really hard to implement in a performant way,
> > in a typical Web browser engine where you expect to be able to use SVG
> > fonts for HTML content, and when you want style inheritance into the
> > glyphs to work the way the spec says it should.
>
> Of course it's the hardest part and yes it's a challenge to make it fast
> enough. But there are other parts that have the same problems (depending
> on the viewer). For WebKit it's a challenge to have a fast enough
> implementation of 'enable-background' (uesed on SVG Filters) with a few
> memory consumption. But we'll work on it, when all concerns about
> 'enable-background' in the upcoming vector-effects are solved.
>

That's actually a good example. The only implementation of enable-background
that I know of is in Opera, and Opera incorrectly clips the background image
to the viewport, which makes implementation much easier :-).

> Saying a browser's implementation is "not complete" when it entirely
> > omits the really hard part would be an understatement.
> Following this comment, Firefox never had SVG support.
>

When our first SVG code landed and we supported <rect> and <circle> and not
much else, it would have been a joke to say our SVG support was "incomplete"
:-). Now that we're just missing a few relatively minor features (plus SVG
Fonts I guess), describing it as incomplete is accurate.

Rob
-- 
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are
healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his
own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah
53:5-6]