Hi, David- Thanks for the honest response. I'll try to address your comments as best I can, and I hope you can bear with me in detailing your issues so we can arrive at a mutual understanding of the situation.
On 6/5/13 10:41 AM, David Dailey wrote: > > I suspect you already know that I’ll not be happy until much more is > accomplished What do you mean by "much more"? Wrapping text to arbitrary shapes? That is also coming, but as part of a more complex proposal that will also hopefully be part of SVG 2 (but may be deferred a bit, since we are trying to be have an aggressive schedule to move SVG 2 forward). Simple CSS text wrapping is meant for the most common case, a basic rectangular area. > and am rather dismayed that it has taken more than a > decade to get even rudimentary text areas into SVG in a way that will > work across browsers. Same here, which is why I'm trying as hard as I can to push this forward, and trying to drum up support for it, to illustrate to the browser vendors that this should be a priority. > Coupling the fate of SVG with developments in CSS seems like putting > the cart before the horse and seems to be slowing down progress in > SVG. In my view, it's just the opposite (as I may have mentioned to you before). Here's a rationale: 1) We have limited people editing the specs for SVG; having people from the CSS WG edit specs increases both the number and the range of expertise of people available to edit (for example, Alan Stearns is an expert in arbitrary text-wrapping from years of work on InDesign, etc., and is editing the CSS Shapes spec, which SVG will use); 2) SVG is *much* less popular than CSS, and is therefore a much lower priority for implementers; by piggybacking on features defined in CSS, we increase the likelihood and the speed of initial implementation, and decrease the cost and improve the rate of maintenance; this may also make the browsers more favorably disposed toward SVG in general, because it's less work for them; 3) By sharing features with CSS/HTML, we dramatically increase the number of authors (developers and designers) who are familiar with and excited by the feature, decreasing the barrier to entry for people just starting out with SVG who are already familiar with CSS and HTML (e.g., the overwhelming majority). The downside, of course, is that there is a little bit of adjustment up front... growing pains. The SVG WG is doing extra work to clean up SVG 2 and make sure things are defined in a way that works well with CSS (and working with the CSS WG to ensure that they define things in a way that works for SVG). Some implementations are being adjusted. But on the whole, it shouldn't affect authors that much (mostly the aforementioned delays on new features), and it should pay big dividends going forward. And I don't really see many other downsides. On the particular topic of this thread, text-wrapping, there is no evidence to support the notion that coordinating with CSS is slowing us down (in fact, the CSS WG's advice was extremely helpful), and explicit evidence to show that this feature would not have moved forward if it were SVG-only: SVG Tiny 1.2 has had a very well-defined <textArea> element [1] for text wrapping that has been around for 4.5 years (!), and has only one browser implementation, Opera (and it's possible Opera's implementation may go away as they move their engine from Presto to Blink... a real shame...). By contrast, within a day of suggesting this to Cameron MacCormack, he had a rough first-pass implementation of text wrapping using 'width', precisely because it came for nearly free by using CSS. I suspect that part of your frustration is not "moving features to CSS" in general, but rather the specific topic of SMIL (and maybe also SVG Fonts). This was not so much a matter of CSS, as it was the specific decisions of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and to some degree Mozilla, all disliked SMIL, and some refused to implement it (or planned to remove existing code bases); it was simply not going to be interoperable, and for most authors, that's a deal-killer. The good news is that, in addition to all the script libraries out there that let you animate in SVG, the new Web Animations 1.0 spec [2] was approved for First Public Working Draft; it is generally more powerful and easier to use than SMIL [3], and a declarative syntax for SVG is planned that should mimic SMIL as much as possible for backwards compatibility. If I've misinterpreted or misunderstood the nature of your concerns, please set me straight. > I suspect my sentiments on such matters are already well known, but I > would be remiss in my obligation to other authors who share this > perspective if I did not say it again. Forgive my ignorance, but is this a common sentiment? I don't hear it expressed much; most of the time when I mention that SVG is deferring to CSS on functionality, it's met with relief, because more people know CSS than SVG. I'd be happy to discuss this more on a dedicated thread. I'm curious what the detailed concerns are, and how many people feel the way you've expressed. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGTiny12/text.html#TextAreaLayout [2] https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/FXTF/raw-file/tip/web-anim/index.html [3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/f/f6/CSS-SVG-Web-Animations.png Regards- -Doug ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [email protected] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! 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