Tons of work (SVG 2, fill & stroke, and more) has sat unimplemented for years. At this point, in standards circles, we know not to touch SVG with a barge pole.
Can someone shed some light on why browsers are so desperate to kill SVG?
Because at this point, I refuse to believe this is just a rational business decision based on hard facts. The hard facts are shouting “Fix your damn implementations!” and browsers are going "la-la-la" 🙉🙉🙉
Even if most web devs won’t directly write SVG markup, SVG is at the core of so many of our interactions on the Web. Logos, charts, icons, illustrations, it’s literally everywhere.
Ironically, browser efforts to kill it prove how crucial it is to web developers: at this point, it has been 15+ years that browsers have refused to improve SVG implementations, and SVG is used more widely than ever. What other Web technology could survive such neglect?
So Igalia kind of already are. The new SVG engine in WebKit should hopefully fix a number of long standing bugs, and maybe open the door to new features.
I'll admit I'm not knowledgeable on the topic but I know something is happening in the SVG space at least.
@karlcow@Lukew@rauschma@leaverou Yes, @igalia has been working on this - as the article above says originally some of this work was funded by some of our @WPEWebKit customers and @igalia ourselves. More recently Wix has sponsored some SVG work/resources toward this... The short answer is "Yes, we could do that and we would love to"...
@karlcow@Lukew@rauschma@leaverou@igalia@WPEWebKit The longer answer is that I've been trying to suggest this since at least 2019 (https://bkardell.com/blog/Beyond.html): Joint interest group funding of areas would make a lot of sense - I've even suggested the W3C might incorporate this (part of the Kronos metaverse thing actually seems to encourage it). I've pitched several - including exactly this one for an SVG fund to folks at other orgs because it seems obvious to me. It's a change in mentality tho
@leaverou I'm somebody who puts a focus on JS-less web development and I not only create SVG assets with Inkscape but also write SVG myself, both static and templated and I think it's the same reason why HTML didn't see any big developments in over 2 decades…
Google has a controlling interest on the web and Google wants everything to depend on JS because that's what their data collection (i.e. profits) are based on.
@leaverou has anyone submitted bug reports for the issues? I'd never heard of any of these problems before or seen any of them in any of the bug trackers, the only SVG issues I see open in firefox that's not related to browser themes and UI is a printing bug causing text offsets when opacity <1 and a linear gradient bug that was opened this last tuesday.
If nobody is reporting the things working incorrectly it's impossible to get them fixed.
@raptor85 Yes. This is not a misunderstanding or lack of awareness. Browsers have communicated their lack of interest in improving or fixing their SVG implementations loud and clear, for years.
@leaverou are you sure? I'm digging through bugzilla and not really finding them, even if there was no intent to fix the bug they would still exist and just be closed with a "wontfix". Even with discussion at a higher level showing disinterest that really doesn't matter, at least not for the open source browsers, patches can be submitted by anyone but to do that examples showing and spelling out exactly what's wrong need to be submitted as a bug.
I can assure you that everyone in the web standards world has not hallucinated this over the last 15+ years.
Our communications with browsers are not limited to bugzilla issues. We’ve been repeatedly told this by actual people working in various UAs in meetings etc. It’s not a secret.
@leaverou I'm sure it has been discussed at a higher level, I don't debate that, what I'm saying though is if you want ACTUAL action to be done, make sure there's bug reports in, lots of this is written by volunteers, and prioritized by the number of bugs submitted. I assure you actual programmers that can fix this for the most part have NO IDEA that there's lingering SVG issues, or even how to define what the issue is, as nobody seems to be reporting them to any project I've been looking at.
@leaverou those higher level discussions? yeah, they can affect priorities being developed in-house at mozilla, but they don't dictate to everyone else what can/can't be worked on. They also never really make it outside of those high level discussions. Put in some tickets, get discussion happening on the TECHNICAL side, not just the business side, and you'll see some movement, likely first in IceCat and extensions before being merged. Can't fly blind though, report the issues so they're visible!
@leaverou If you follow @anatudor, you'll see a lot of posts about SVG, with caveats "this works in X but not in Y, and this other thing works in Y but breaks in Z"… definitely would love to see SVG get some attention at least for interop!
@leaverou I'm a little surprised there is no SVG equivalent of an ACID3 test. I'm seeing 1.1 and 1.2 tiny test suites, but there's no motivation like the simple Make Number Go Up
@leaverou Chrome rendering an SVG containing even small amounts of xhtml in <foreignObject> is the sole time I have managed to spin the fans on my M3 Max.
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