SVG Working Group Charter

Scope

This group will produce incremental, market-driven revisions to the SVG format, suitable for both desktop and mobile systems, and will maintain and clarify existing SVG specifications.

Native implementation of SVG in desktop browsers has increased dramatically, with substantial support in Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and WebKit/Safari, as well as browser plug-ins by smaller vendors. With this increased interest, the SVG specifications have had greater scrutiny and more critical feedback regarding features and consistency. Response to market pressures and the need to cover gaps in underlying technologies resulted in a broad feature set for SVG 1.2 Tiny, which drew criticism. In response, the SVG Working Group has factored out reusable functionality to the WebAPI Working Group for use in other specifications, and will continue to improve its activities in the following ways:

• increase group membership by broader base of implementors
• improve accountability and transparency, including maintaining a public issue tracker
• develop smaller, more timely specifications, to reflect market needs and allow for ease of review
• improve integration with other W3C specifications and Working Groups, including:
  • CSS and XSL, to allow styling of graphics and to allow the use of SVG by those technologies
  • WICD, to ensure that SVG graphics can be placed inline in multi-namespace XML documents
  • HTML, XHTML 2, and CDF WGs, to specify how those technologies work together in different scenarios, such as SVG inline, in embedding elements, as a static image, as CSS backgrounds, or as the root of the document
• create tighter conformance requirements to ensure interoperability, comprised of:
  • a comprehensive test suite
  • up-to-date errata
  • more stringent and clear conformance criteria in the specifications themselves
  • striving for a test-first methodology to improve the specifications while also developing test suite materials
  • potential creation of interoperability reports
• simplify and unify the feature set to appeal universally to desktop and mobile implementors

In order to meet the goal of more timely specifications, work will continue on modularization of feature sets. Additional goals of modularization are to ease incremental implementation and specification review, to allow greater reuse of existing features in other specifications (e.g. CSS or HTML), and to address requirements identified in the SVG 1.2 timeframe that could not be fully realized in the SVG 1.2 Tiny specification. Several modules are planned for publication, including:

• Media Access Events
• Filters
• Paint Servers
• SVG Masking and Clipping
• SVG Vector Effects
• SVG Compositing
• SVG Layout, including relative position values and constraints
• SVG Print
• WebFonts
• SVG Transformations (perspective effects)
• SVG graphical user interface enhancements

In particular, SVG will consider the applicability of enhancements to the core language to both desktop and resource-limited devices, such as mobile devices and printers.

To allow more advanced design features and efficient decorative effects, there will be attention paid to new stroking and filling options, including pseudo-3D (2.5D) effects by means of new gradients, filters, and non-affine transformations, with authoring tips for their use.

The work on SVG will move toward more widespread implementation and greater interoperability, in multiple browsers across multiple platforms, and created by multiple authoring or generation tools. See the activity statement for the overall goals and rationale of this activity area.

In order to ensure that the language meets the needs of the community, including designers and casual authors in addition to developers, the SVG WG will engage with the SVG Interest Group, which will have a lower barrier of entry and fewer responsibilities than the SVG WG itself. This charter will accomodate the creation of new specification modules in order to address the needs raised by the reports of the SVG IG and workshops.

The scope of this charter will include the creation of a new version of the SVG specification that improves on the core SVG language, upon which the individual module extensions may be attached. The details of this new version will depend upon the input of SVG WG members and the needs outlined by the SVG Interest Group.

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.