Re: SVG 1.2 Vector Effects

Hi David,

--Original Message--:
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>A colleague and I are working on a paper together and have some questions about SVG1.2 and, specifically, the vector effects parts:
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>1. I gather that SVG 1.2 is still a working draft. Will it become a recommendation or will the WG just bypass it and move to 2.0? And if so, will Vector Effects become a part of that? 

1.2 was in development for a long time - so long we did debate whether to rename it 2.0 a
few times. In the course of standardization what progresses is what the people in the WG
spend time on. So, during that time there were a lot of members interested in Tiny and so,
a lot of work was done to push Tiny 1.2 forward at the expense of the work being done
for Full.

So the WG decided to split out the various features done as part of the 1.2 work and make
them modules. This is likely to be the approach taken for 2.0 - a core, with optional extra
modules. Vector effects would be one of them.

>2. What progress, if any, do we know of browsers or other user agents actually implementing Vector Effects? I know that Opera has implemented some very important parts of 1.2. Is there any inventory of cross-browser progress on the various parts of 1.2? 

Inkscape implemented all the text flow stuff in 1.2 which is really cool, more so than vectoro effects
since you can wrap text inside arbitrary polygons, etc. Very useful for flow charts and all sorts
of things. Alas, progress on that part of the spec. has stalled due to dissenting voices in other
(non) namespaces...

We implement most of the compositing blend modes for 1.2 as does the Adobe viewer in
it's own privae namespace (try exporting a burn from Illustrator and check the output).
We also do the non-scaling vector effect.

As far as I'm aware no other vector effects ever made it to an implementation, the original
draft was hopelessly underspecified and a total lack of authoring tools generating it didn't
motivate anyone to implement. However some effects could be easy and useful to do,
but there are some like the union/intersection primitives that would be challenging to
build efficiently and correctly and so, are unlikely to appear very soon in any viewers
I know of.

>3. Are there JavaScript implementations available as an API or something for doing the various things discussed in Vector Effects? I have a notion (albeit fuzzy) that as specs are moved along the path from working draft to recommendation, they frequently find some instantiation in actual code somewhere.

There always must be 2 implementations of a feature to prove it can be built before
reaching Proposed Recommendation. So yes there would be implementations if it
were to be finished but who know how long that would take! Doing it in JS is likely
to be painful for the more interesting effects.

Cheers,
Alex

>4. A number of the images in the vector effects primer are broken : http://dev.w3.org/SVG/modules/vectoreffects/master/SVGVectorEffectsPrimer.html . Any chance those could be repaired?
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>regards
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>David
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Received on Friday, 18 February 2011 21:47:25 UTC