Re: agenda+ SVG 2 Features and Approach

Doug Schepers:

>But I have heard repeatedly from different browser vendors that until we 
>start seeing even more use of SVG by content creators, they are unlikely 
>to prioritize improving SVG support;

Knowing the behaviour of 'normal' authors, the argument the other way
around works as well - as long as common viewers have so many bugs and 
gaps many authors say: 
'This is not ready to use, we will look at some statistics about bugs and gaps
next year, to decide, whether the format is usable or not for authors beyond
testing viewer capabilities and creating workarounds for bugs and gaps.'
Implementation stagnation therefore only means, that authors will wait for
another and yet another year before providing more content.

It is not much use for authors to provide content, that is not presented 
correctly in common viewers. And it would be much more complex for
SVG to work around current gaps and bugs of viewers than for example
for (X)HTML or even CSS. For example for CSS it was still an option to
keep the stylesheet simple for many years to get more or less usable
decorations. If a feature in SVG interpretation is missing, the gaphics is
simply wrong - and many authors will not publish this at all and some
others may provide such hints as 'Use version 9.51 of browser X to see it
correctly, don't even try browser U, V, W in any version and no earlier
version of X and no X version 10.? due to regressions in these versions.'
Because it is predictable, that not all users will use version 9.51 of
browser X, the author becomes frustrated and starts to care about
other problems/formats ;o) 

If SVG on the other hand would be simplified only to a subset, that
more viewers can interprete correctly, this does not help such authors
either, because this does not cover their use case - and again they
will start to care about other problems/formats.

Olaf

Received on Monday, 9 May 2011 10:15:26 UTC