Hi Domenico, I understand your main argument that you think it's too early to release Mozilla's SVG implementation, and that you think the overall effect will be to harm SVG on the Web. I just happen to take the opposite view. Clearly there are people on this list that fall into both camps; some for, some against.
Some specific comments: If the 70% figure of rendering success has been realistically set by > yourself then I don't dispute it, but I randomly visited about 15 of > the svg links in my bookmarks and got 0% positive results. I wonder how many of these were a result of problems in the SVG vs. problems or missing features in Mozilla. Unfortunately so much of the SVG in the wild falls into the former category it's difficult to determine figures regarding how much should work, and how much is expected not to. A big difference between ASV 1 and 2 and FFsvg is that ASV simply > allowed the kick off, I don't think there were any works prior to > that, or were there? The scenario is totally opposite for FF In my opinion SVG has done anything but "kick off" on the Web. The volume of SVG out there doesn't even register when compared to mainstream Web content and that situation has previously shown little sign of change. Personally, I believe a fundamental reason for this has been the lack of native support. A lot of people simply won't consider using a technology for which the only real support is a plug-in with an unknown, but probably small and shrinking install base. Native support not only eliminates the plug-in barrier, but for some people I expect it will allay concerns about the technology's future on the Web. By putting a partial implementation into the hands of the wider developer community we might give SVG a chance to "kick off" on the Web for real - before it's too late. Waiting until a year from now (actually probably more like 18 months) would certainly be too late I think. We need that time for new people to start learning about it and begin to use it. This way some current SVG won't work, yes. But it will bring in a whole new user base, giving SVG a chance to live and grow rather than wither into permenant insignificance, on the Web. Of course in this type of > society the trend to not listen to older, wiser people, is ever > galloping. "Not fair!" It was widely known that we planned to include our SVG support, we provided links to test builds and we asked for feedback. We were listening. We still are. But unfortunatley that doesn't mean we can make everyone happy, or that we can go back now and turn off the SVG support. Jonathan, > > In my letter I can read: > "artists and programmers" > "artists and technicians" > Can you? Yes. I read that. I'm not sure why you ask. You say you (the Mozilla team) poled the community. I've been away > from the list for a few months, as other developers have. Wouldn't > have it been more appropriate to make some individual contact, like > you did when you suggested auditing, and seek personal advice > like "Hi xyz, the implementation is in advanced state, but this and > that is still missing, do you think it would be blah blah?". I generally contacted people for one of three reasons; 1) their site contained an SVG tutorial that taught "bad" authoring practices (or didn't mention the basic things that are vital in FF); 2) we got a complaint from a FF tester that we didn't render the SVG on site X, and it turned out that site X's SVG was "bad"; 3) a few other random sites that I felt were high profile and it would be good to see working for FF 1.5. In general when I contacted people I always mentioned that the FF release was expected soon and that our SVG support would be turned on, so those same people should have been aware of it. I imagine I gave you that information too, although I don't have those emails to hand ATM. Some people replied to my emails, and some people (like yourself) even did work on their SVG as a result. However, you were in the minority. For the most part I never heard back and nothing changed, or else I got so much resistance that I decided direct emailing was a poor use of my very limited time. Having talked on and off the lists for months both about how to make your SVG valid enough to give FF a fighting chance to render it, and the fact that we were going to release our SVG implementation, I hoped that awareness was high enough for people to make their own decisions to test their content or not. If you haven't been on list for some time that's unfortunate, but it was never going to be possible to catch everyone. The > majority replied "yes". Did you take into consideration eventually > what the minority said? Did you think it was appropriate to sort by > number instead of by experience level? We considered what everyone had to say. In general it's hard to guage how "experienced" people are, or how representative of existing SVG content authors they are, but several of the most well known SVG figures were amoung those that said yes. I'm not sure that you quite > got the measure of how much artists, programmers and developers are > concerned. The work that they have ALREADY done is affected, valid > or not valid. I guess not. Other than this thread, we haven't heard much from people in this vein. Hopefully that isn't because of an expectation that we would take offense. Unless we're subjected to a personal and abusive attack that won't be the case. I'm keen to hear feedback (on or off list) from all sides to get a better idea of how much demand exists for different features. Although, as I said, that won't change what's in FF 1.5 now, it gives us a focus for the next release. We don't hear too much from people regarding this, perhaps because people don't want to use up our time and they assume we know what's missing. Well we do know what's missing, but we could certainly do with a better idea of how much demand there is for specific features to help us focus on what to implement/fix next. > I am, of course, very sorry that you find that the SVG support is > not up > > to your needs. > > You sound like an AT&T public relation agent. I can do without this > type of remark. I raised an issue that I see as a problem, and a > solution that I think would be beneficial for the community, > including Mozilla. Unfortunately this is a problem when communicating with someone you don't know personally and can't hear or see. I'm not an AT&T public relation agent. I was being very genuine there, as I really am sorry for your problems and I didn't want you to think I was unsympathetic. > Those sound like rather nasty problems. Bug reports with testcases > would > > be helpful. > > Are you serious??? I'm a human, can you please talk in a way other > than binary logic? I mean... SMIL is missing in the implementation > and you ask for bug report? What would be the point? You call them > nasty problems, that is what they are, not bugs. The descriptions you gave sounded like they were most likely the result of bugs to me, not missing functuality. Work is underway on SMIL, but if you have other specific functionality that you need implemented please do flag it to us. Did you raise the issue at all with the > Mozilla Foundation before stating that it's "very unlikely that the > Mozilla Foundation would take sucha drastic step"? No, I didn't. But I've been involved with Mozilla for the last five years in one way or another, and I have a fairly good idea what scale of problem is required to cause a new release. Unfortunately for anyone against including the SVG support in 1.5 this isn't on that scale, I think. Regards, Jonathan [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/2jUsvC/tzNLAA/TtwFAA/1U_rlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
