RE: Future plans for SVG Fonts and SVG (SMIL) Animation in browsers (Was: DOM4 not compatible with ACID3 tests)

It seems to me that if the SVG Working Group were to try to withdraw W3C
recommendations, such as SMIL animation and SVG fonts, that are now several
years out of the barn, then objections will quite naturally be filed at the
most formal of possible levels, barring fancy procedural footwork to prevent
such objections from being heard. Animation is already implemented, at least
partially, and quite usefully, by all major browsers but one and by many
mobile platforms that do not support a scripting alternative. Client side
font-generation is a use case for SVG fonts not handled by WOFF, as well as
a good many other issues of font support, particularly as they affect
accessibility. Hiding the geometry of glyphs in bitblobs does not have the
same opportunity to be leveraged by assistive technologies.

Rather than dropping SVG tests from acid tests, the test suites that many
have been working on, instead, increase reliance on SVG, including SVG
animation to tweak out the extant gaps in support that are revealed as
browser and mobile support for SVG and animation matures. I suppose if you
want tests that everyone passes then dropping hard tests makes sense.
However, dropping support for the hard parts of SVG because vendors don't
like them, in the long run, I think, weakens the W3C's credibility.

David

-----Original Message-----
From: www-svg-request@w3.org [mailto:www-svg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Brian Birtles
Sent: Friday, September 09, 2011 8:08 PM
To: www-svg@w3.org
Cc: Ian Hickson; Jonas Sicking
Subject: Re: Future plans for SVG Fonts and SVG (SMIL) Animation in browsers
(Was: DOM4 not compatible with ACID3 tests)

(2011/09/10 4:55), Ian Hickson wrote:
 > I'm not closely involved in the SVG work. Can someone elaborate on the
 > status of SVG Fonts and SMIL animation in terms of future plans for
 > browser vendors? Are these features that are intended to be phased out?

Mozilla is not planning to support SVG Fonts (as per [1][2][3];  however 
the idea of embedding SVG Fonts in OpenType[4] has attracted some 
interest including from Mozilla). That said, there was a resolution that 
SVG 2 would mandate support for SVG Fonts to some degree.[5]

SMIL Animation is up in the air at the moment. Microsoft have expressed 
concern about implementing it, or at least a preference to prioritise 
CSS Animations. There has been talk about harmonising the two 
technologies but until that path is clear some browser vendors are 
reluctant to invest further in SMIL. There are outstanding action items 
to investigate some of the options here.

Best regards,

Brian Birtles

[1] http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3
[2] 
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/06/not-implementing-features-is-hard_03.htm
l
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2011Jun/0042.html
[5] http://www.w3.org/2011/03/01-svg-minutes.html#item04

Received on Saturday, 10 September 2011 00:56:26 UTC