Re: SVG 2 Features and Approach

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 3:06 AM, Charles Lamont
<charles@gateho.gotadsl.co.uk> wrote:
> But mere font outlines is to completely miss the the reason for wanting SVG
> fonts. It is all the other possibilities that make them attractive to the
> end user.

It's not *quite* mere font outlines - iirc, you can do multi-colored
text in the FF implementation, for example, which means it's
sufficient to support simple colored emoji.

> I have had a few private emails suggesting there is a fair amount of end
> user desire for this functionality, and dismay that is being kicked into the
> long grass again, or even into oblivion. Why is it so painful to implement
> anyway (as non-technical as possible, please)?

I'm not the best person to ask, as I have only tangential knowledge of
the troubles with fonts, but from what I understand the problem is
simply the shear quantity of things you can do with full SVG.  For
example, you can embed videos, external documents, foreignContent,
animations, filters, and a bunch more.  This stuff is just *crazy*
compared to what any other font format allows, and it's a lot of
effort (and a lot of potential security issues) to implement compared
to normal fonts.

If SVG fonts was nothing more than path data and the font metrics,
plus perhaps some stroke/fill support, it's very likely it would be
much less controversial.  But the SVG WG hasn't attempted to cut down
the spec to that level, and so in the absence of that, browsers have
generally just rejected it, or implemented only a small subset of it
(and not spent much effort on bugfixing that subset).

~TJ

Received on Friday, 11 January 2013 18:11:15 UTC