SVG Working Group Charter

Scope

SVG has matured into a widely-implemented specification for interactive graphics, used in viewers, authoring tools, and other standards. The SVG Working Group needs to build upon this solid foundation by adding new graphical and behavioral features to make it even easier for content creators to make compelling and effective graphical content. This includes syntactic sugar and canned effects for some of its more powerful features such as filters and animation. It is important for SVG to maintain a minimum degree of backwards compatibility with existing implementations.

Since SVG is also used as part of a platform for rich Web applications, both alone and in conjunction with other technologies such as HTML, the SVG Working Group must address the needs of those developers. Since the SVG language was originally developed at a time without the broad proliferation of different browsers under active development, and when many basic architectural aspects of XML were still developing, some features of the SVG language were not ideally integrated into other languages and architectural design. Specifically, SVG's DOM APIs and certain syntactic conventions need reexamination and redesign. The SVG Working group intends to solicit community feedback from known experts in addressing these issues, perhaps through a workshop.

Many features of SVG were successful enough to be adopted by CSS, such as gradients, filter effects, and animations, and in order to ensure interoperability, the SVG Working Group must work closely with the CSS Working Group to co-develop those features, to provide a consistent model for authors and implementers.

The Canvas API provides a complementary method for creating dynamic raster graphics, and the use of this API in SVG will provide more power for authors. A shared graphical API for both SVG and Canvas may be appropriate.

SVG will benefit from more explicit integration with other technologies such as X/HTML, as outlined in specifications produced by the CDF and HTML Working Groups, styling and layout technologies produced by the CSS and XSL-FO Working Groups, and more precise measures for accessibility.

For all new work, the SVG Working Group intends to gather and publish produce use cases and requirements, primers to illustrate the purpose and use of specifications, test suites to ensure interoperable implementations, and where possible, script libraries to prototype features and allow for early experimentation and adoption by authors.

In addition, the SVG Working Group will continue to maintain existing SVG specifications, publish errata and new revisions where required, update test suites, and provide current implementation reports.

Success Criteria

• More widespread adoption of SVG by content authors and developers.
• Production of stable documents collectively addressing each of the Work Items, at W3C Recommendation status.
• Availability of multiple, independent, interoperable implementations of SVG, and authoring tools for SVG, including implementations on mobile devices and implementations on printers.