RE: new feature request

Microsoft's refusal was years ago and there are several indications that they have since reconsidered, at least two of which have been posted to this group. Chris Lilley posted one. I posted another. 

Undoing specs that are 15 years old, applications based on those specs and documentation built on those specs seems not just unconscionable but malicious. There used to be a silly Apple/Google mantra called "don't break the web." I guess the whole pretense of making things interoperable and standardized has been abandoned in favor of laissez faire capitalism. What a grand charade the standards process has been!

I have witnessed progressive cross-browser degradation of standards-compliant SVG code over 6 years now. I am talking about hundreds and hundreds of tests that used to be both standards compliant and working consistently in all relevant browsers. The life of authors has not been improved. 

I am not alone in these thoughts, btw. The discontent among the authoring community is, I would claim, widespread.

As is often the case in debates hosted at WG's the lone dissenter is outshouted, and reason does not prevail. That CSS animation is showing greater adoption than SMIL is no surprise given the inertia of HTML. The purposes of HTML (big letter T for text) and SVG (big letter G for graphics) are intrinsically different. What is presentation in CSS is semantic in SVG. The folks who don't realize this appear to be leading the initiative toward a lemming-cliff. Intense discouragement among the advocates of a technology is not necessarily in the best long term interest of the web, nor of the W3C. Building specs that attract early adopters and then pulling rugs out from under those same adopters is clearly a way to promote dissent rather than to build community. 

David Dailey PhD
Professor of Mathematics, Computer Science and Psychology 
author of two books on SVG including one hosted by W3C 
and extremely frustrated  

-----Original Message-----
From: Tab Atkins Jr. [mailto:jackalmage@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2015 6:22 PM
To: ddailey
Cc: Philip Rogers; Dirk Schulze; Thomas O Smailus; Boris Zbarsky; www-svg
Subject: Re: new feature request

On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 12:51 PM,  <ddailey@zoominternet.net> wrote:
> Just how and why are people dropping SMIL? Where does the formal objection get lodged?
>
> I cannot think of anything more dramatically incorrect to do.
>
> Clearly some views of the future of SVG are inconsistent with  others.
>
> I cannot make an objection to such folly strongly worded enough.

Microsoft has publicly refused to implement SMIL, and has persisted in this.  Chrome is dropping native SMIL support and replacing it with browser-JS that reimplements in with Web Animations.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 17 March 2015 02:16:07 UTC