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

Hi Ian & All,

You wrote:
>On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Brian Birtles wrote:
>> (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.
>> 
>> [1] http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3
>> [2] http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/06/not-implementing-features-is-hard_03.html
>> [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
>
>Thanks, that's very useful information.
>
>Can anyone from Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Opera comment further on this 
>topic?

I can't comment for any of these organisations but a few points:

1) At the Mozilla Auckland F2F Roc pretty much accepted that the Tiny fonts
as per [5] would likely be OK for Mozilla.

2) The SVG in OpenType is interesting but not likely to see the light
of day for a number of years if ever

3) All the dominant mobile browsers support SVG Fonts now - i.e. Opera
(which can also use SVG fonts in HTML content); Apple's Safari and
also Android's browser since Honeycomb.

WebKit and/or Opera are highly unlikely to remove their implementations
as other products depend on that feature (like iTunes albums for example).

Cheers,
Alex

>-- 
>Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
>http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
>Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 10 September 2011 02:35:52 UTC