Re: SVG's future

Conclusions


This discussion showed so much concern about formalism. So here is an empty
discussion in good respectful form. How interesting!


If people are happy with this there can be three explanations only:
blissful unconsciousness, or the need to screen protest and accusation. The
third suggestion would be against the code of conduct, so it cannot exist.


About the code of conduct, it was strongly suggested to me under threat of
exclusion, in private by a moderator, to follow the code of conduct [
https://www.w3.org/Consortium/cepc/], in particular the voices on
harassment and respect. In that code harassment is an attempt of partial
redefinition of existing laws as defined in reference countries. In
particular, the fundamental notion of “repeated or systematic” is omitted.
That is practical for dismissing uncomfortable protests and accusations
under the label of harassment. In any case the law does not treat verbal
attacks in disputes if they are not followed by physical threats. However,
a person who feels was the target of defamation can always file a lawsuit.


I was also told the law does not force an organization to publish, but it
doesn’t either legitimize the ban of expression based on custom
interpretations of the laws.


In that same code, respect is defined as to be a promotion of hypocrisy.


Accusation, protest, and insinuation were rejected on the grounds that we
were “uninformed”, but without providing substantial details that would
make us “informed”, suggesting that the opposing party preferred to keep
some information “secret” (open secrets really), probably because it
betrays arbitrary, deliberate, unilateral decisions. Very simply, it’s
comfortable not to have to disclose it, in the light of what it represents.


At the end of the discussion we managed to get a sort of emotion driven
confession about strategies and decisions, one that was cut short for fear
that it would be “way more text than is reasonable for people to read”.


One gray eminence did his Sacra Rota prosecuting bit with all the due
hatred.


One other gray eminence said it’s not with philosophy that you make
specifications. Missing the fact that the discussion was not about how to
make specifications, he claimed he holds keys to help implementation, keys
that he would be willing to share privately, the same keys that helped him
fail while he was in charge.


A fundamental domain of SVG is geometry. The fact of having to beg for
extensions (the fruit of years of work and engagement) through proving in
whichever way their utility and necessity, is paradoxical.


It was suggested to show to the decision makers the need for features
through polyfills. It is not credible that anyone would really need that
kind of proof for most extensions, not least for text. The culture gap
would be too big to believe.


I maintain instead that the move was probably done in bad faith (as in
“intentional deceit of others”), and following predetermined plans (the
term of “conspiracy” suggested  by the opposing party is of course
inappropriate and disproportionate for this matter. It has more to do with
the need to use the ever trendy term “conspiracy theory”, that political
tool for trying to magnify an accusation in order to minimize its effect,
or possibly to divert it completely).


It was stated that projects like Houdini became priority. Giving developers
and framework authors the possibility to hack into the browser’s internals,
and through that the power to normalize cross-browser inconsistencies and
to make polyfills or even invent new features, is a natural path to follow
for JavaScript. To make it a priority –as it was stated– is even
understandable, but if it results in the exclusion of other necessary work
then it’s not justified. That is not the definition of priority. That stems
out from not solicited visionary arbitration. The desire for brainstorming
may be legitimate, but if the result means drowning other concrete,
essential and valid projects that are already following their normal
course, then we say don’t. That is confusion, a thing that people don’t
need.


Coordination avoids confusion. At this stage the coordination from the W3
is hardly possible, because things already got out of hand, for reasons
that were never clarified, and for which responsibility was not taken. It
would be instead a necessity for the implementers, but now that we are
“informed” –another open secret– we learn that posts are attributed to
people who, admittedly, are not qualified. And not only that, those people
do actually accept those posts! Then the ones and the others both react in
an autistic manner due to the confusion they generated.


The justification


The implementers respond to public demand. What is that exactly? You can
divide the developers into two categories: 1) those who know what to do and
work without the constant need to ask questions, they study their tools,
fully explore their potential, and wait patiently to take advantage of
evolutions; 2) Those who are in constant need for assistance, seeking
endlessly new tools that could help them reach some nirvana.


The first needs ideas to invent, create, produce.


The second needs new tools, period.


The first is not very present on wish lists. The second is, and is
considered public demand.


Responding to public demand only, in no way means responding to the needs
of those who invent, create, produce.


A practical user’s experience of the web today: I recently bought a washing
machine and an electric plunge saw. Now when I visit any page with
commercials the whole browser scrolls up and down on its own, the page may
start singing or speaking spontaneously from a video that is somewhere else
in the page, and that may be replaced by another one. My pages are flooded
with all sorts of power tools and other tools (I bought the tool after the
washing machine). Reading turns into a nightmare. I do know there’s a
technique for “impressionist” reading, to just get a quick overview and get
as many as you can of those overviews, but I never learnt it, and I don’t
think it’s terribly interesting or educative. I also get two banners: “Get
it on GooglePlay” and “Download on App Store”. I don’t know what though.
I’m also reminded I should report inappropriate advertising.


To resume, today I learn from the highway of information that I should: 1)
buy one more household appliance; 2) buy more power tools; 3) watch videos;
4) get stuff on GooglePlay;  5) get stuff on App Store; 6) make reports
about inappropriate advertising (in other words, I should work for free for
ad agencies to help them fine tune their techniques).


That is the kind of work from the second category. That is what one
implementer seems to think the browser should be. If the public demand
corresponds to its visions, then it becomes priority.


We also note how the word “priority” is used to mask the lack of intention
or desire from some browser vendor to finish the implementation of SVG.


We learn that, whatever that is, that’s how it works. The magic words used
to cover the bare fact that advertising, and all the money that circulates
with it, is THE reality and you can’t do nothing about it. Then if someone
insists that shouldn’t prevent or limit the cultural development of the
web, he is treated with dismissal in the best of cases, or insolence, or
arrogance, or ferocity. In all cases the debate is refused or diverted, the
argumentations are carelessly bypassed or ignored. This is what I could
see, and all I know is that it’s wrong by democratic standards.


We finally learnt in the last post that the browsers’ vendors have “some
limitation of resources”, and that their engineers, given the limited
resources, cannot take care of everything.


WE GOT ONCE MORE THE MUCH REITERATED EXPLANATION OF THE MECHANISM AS BEING
A LEGITIMIZATION IN ITSELF, WHILE INSTEAD WE PUT INTO CAUSE THE VALIDITY OF
ARBITRARY AND UNILATERAL STRATEGIES AND DECISIONS THAT WE CONSIDER
CULTURALLY DETRIMENTAL.


We also deserved this revelatory comment “the majority of the SVGs on the
web remain very simple”. Along with much of what was said by the opposing
party, it’s revelatory in the sense that it simply shows a level of
ignorance.


The last paragraph of that post regarding the open source browser engines
suggests that maybe some haven’t read the post that generated this thread,
or should read it again, along with the whole discussion. They may find
leaks and cracks in their lines of thought.


Finally, nobody from the opposing party seemed to be wanting to even
remotely consider the idea of resulting prejudice.

Domenico Strazzullo

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 5:29 PM, Geoffrey Sneddon <me@gsnedders.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 12:55 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > SVG2 is a really useful effort in a number of ways - it tightened up a
> > lot of definitions, and making the SVG DOM more consistent with HTML
> > and CSS, along with a few other tightened integrations between SVG and
> > HTML/CSS, have been extremely good.
>
> […]
>
> > Additionally, the WG as a whole was somewhat starved for attention.
> > An individual can only attend so many international meetings in a
> > year; with CSS already eating up 4 of those meetings, and the heavy
> > overlap between browser engineers who work with SVG and CSS, it meant
> > that it was difficult to get the same sort of attendance from browser
> > engineers.  (I personally haven't attended an SVGWG meeting for over a
> > year for this reason; I budget my time away from home pretty
> > carefully, and am definitely primarily a CSS person.)  The WG didn't
> > adapt to this very well, still trying to do a lot of the work in
> > face-to-face meetings, and as a result a lot of decisions got made in
> > groups that didn't include proper stakeholders.  (This is a hard thing
> > to solve, so I don't blame the WG much; WICG is trying to drive good
> > practices for this route now.)
>
> To mostly agree with Tab:
>
> I definitely think SVG2 is a worthwhile effort, but at some point
> there's some limitation of resources that browser vendors have: SVG2
> is inherently always going to be in competition with other new
> features when it comes to implementer time. Browser vendors aren't at
> the end of the day bottomless pits of money and resources and some
> prioritisation is inevitable.
>
> The fairly small number of people at each vendor who primarily work on
> SVG spend the majority of their time (AFAICT!) fixing interop bugs
> which was in many ways in later years one of the major aims of SVG2
> (through tightening up definitions). Looking through the highest
> priority SVG bugs on Chromium[0], for example, almost all of the P1/2
> bugs are about correctness, performance, and crashes.
>
> To some degree the relatively low usage of SVG plays into this as
> well; new CSS features tend to get far more uptake than new SVG
> features (as far as I can tell, the majority of the SVGs on the web
> remain very simple, but obviously implementation quality as a result
> of low priority as a result of low usage will play into that).
>
> That all said, I don't think anyone has any fundamental objects to any
> of the new features in SVG2—it is purely a matter of prioritisation. I
> suspect that all the open source browser engines would welcome more in
> the way of contributions to SVG, both adding new SVG2 features and
> fixing existing bugs.
>
> /g
>