Re: SVG's future

On 3 February 2017 at 12:07, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de> wrote:
>  Sebastian Zartner:
>
>>
>> The authors should identify why there is no strong interest in
>> implementing SVG 2's features.
>>
> ...
>
>
> My impression was, that for example Opera gave up Presto (with the currently
> still best SVG implemention, including parts of SVG tiny 1.2 - here we have
> already the mentioned vector effects defined and in SVG tiny 1.2 viewers
> implemented as far as defined), because they had no money anymore and
> not enough users for their commercial products.
> This was not related to SVG itself, but maybe it was related, they tried to
> follow standards, but other vendors had more success with proprietary stuff and
> control of their customers ;-)

Sure, companies live from their customers. And it's the decision of
the customers which products they use.

> Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google,  Adobe, Amazon etc obviously prefer
> their own products and formats to ensure, that they can control and abase
> their customers and addicted people, therefore it is natural to undermine and
> erode independent standards.

It's clear that the big players have the most influence on the
standards. But, as said above, it's up to the users which products to
use. So, in the end, it's up to the users who has the most influence.
Back in the days when Mozilla released the first versions of Firefox,
it was successful enough that it took more and more people away from
IE, so that in the end Microsoft could not push its proprietary
standards anymore and had to start opening up to keep to the standards
of others.

> The HTML5 tag soup specification instead of only defining a simple new XHTML
> variant with a thought out concept to markup text in a semantic way is a good
> example, intentionally it is designed so complex, that new vendors are
> frustrated to attack the oligopoly with an independent new and own viewer.

Well, Mozilla is still there as the only independent choice. But, of
course, it's hard for new vendors to get into this market and get
enough user base to have something to say regarding the standards.

> Trying to jam in SVG with obfuscated notation into the HTML5 tag soups,
> removing XLink syntax, SMIL, SVG fonts is an attempt to get the same situation
> for SVG.

I claim removing the XLink syntax is a step forward regarding
simplicity and acceptance of SVG. SMIL is still supported in four of
the five main browsers. Google rescinded their removal of the SMIL
implementation.[1] Only Microsoft doesn't have plans to implement
it.[2] But in the long term it seems that, at least browser vendors,
rather want to switch over to CSS animations, which is a proper static
declaration equivalent. SVG fonts obviously didn't have much support
among implementors, but got replaced by WOFF, also an open standard.

> Well and CSS - there are mainly only drafts, but vendors propagate
> nevertheless to authors already to use their prefixed own properties and syntax

(Browser) vendors moved away from prefixed properties years ago in
favor of preferences to avoid incompatibilities. They do not propagate
their prefixed own properties and syntax (anymore).

Sebastian

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/5o0yiO440LM/YGEJBsjUAwAJ
[2] http://status.modern.ie/svgsmilanimation

Received on Saturday, 4 February 2017 22:03:17 UTC