Re: SVG's future

Rik Cabanier:

...
> > Why, if we know already, that SVG 2 is dead and several other activities
> > of
> > the W3C like semantic web, separation of content and decoration, are
> > borked
> > now for years?
> 
> Only a few vocal people are insisting on "perfect" academic solutions; most
> authors are quite happy to live in the messy but forgiving world that is
> the web today. Browser vendor's priorities reflect this.

SVG is XML, it has no such unfortunate tag soup history then for example HTML.
No need to obfuscate this.
That authors do not care about proper digital documents in case of HTML is a 
direct result of the attempt of browser to present the impression of meaning
for nonsense document, would be quite different if they simply reject nonsense,
not even conforming to XML.
After this there would be much better chances for vendors to provide programs 
based on simple XML parsers.
I think, there are much more programs around with the capability to interpret 
(parts of) SVG than there are programs around with the capability to interpret 
HTML tag soup.
This is an obvious indications, that tag soup blocks progress in digital 
media, everything stucks now in the HTML5+CSS+JS jam without structure and 
without separation of content from decoration.
All this indicates clearly, that the tag soup approach is a fail that 
frustrates accessible and free usage of digital media.

...
> 
> SVG is more successful today than it's ever been. Maybe those incomplete
> features weren't needed in the first place?

Well, you can realise simple images, for more complex ones you are limited by 
huge file sizes. Some features required for SVG 2 have the capabilities to 
allow to realise other types of images with an acceptable file size.
Without these features implemented you will never see such works, authors with 
such ideas will not care about SVG, because currently it is only of use for 
simple images, not much different from what you can publish anyway with PNG. 

> 
> I believe that the future of SVG does not consist of new graphical features
> but of a deeper integration with the rest of the platform as well as offer
> more consistency. (ie common matrices, CORS/CSP, CSS)
> That can be done outside of SVG and AFAIK is still moving ahead.

Using XML (implicating XLink, SMIL, RDF etc), SVG is integrated perfectly 
already right from the start, it has the capability to be combined with other 
XML formats, allows usage of CSS and XSL(T), even scripting with ecmascript.
One can use entities within the doctype declaration.
This happened already right from the start at the beginning of the century.
Everyone looking for this now stucks still in the last millenium.

Why to introduce yet another format 'AFAIK', having already standards, you 
obviously do not know, already specified for such an long time? ;o)

Now we need some real progress with new features, helping and inspiring 
authors to realise works, they could not publish or even think before.
Current stagnation or even regression is quite boring and frustrating both for 
authors and the audience waiting for new work with content, they have never 
seen before.

Understandable for me, that this increasing frustration results in polemic 
accusations and heavy attacks, just because W3C has failed here already for 
years - and members have been informed about there failing for years already
without trying to correct there false approach.
One cannot really expect, that there will never be some reaction on this 
collapse of the organisation as well as some thoughts about how to get rid of 
this failure.


Olaf

Received on Monday, 13 February 2017 13:24:10 UTC