emeyer: Welcome to this breakout session. Thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it. Basically I think most of us in the room probably know this. But just to sort of set the stage. SVG has some very deep roots in at the W3C and in general. There was a call for proposals in 1998, and then the work officially started in 1999. First W3C Recommendation was a couple years later and the 1st browser support was 3.5 years after that roughly with Konqueror, which was pretty cool.

emeyer: Then there have been various attempts to move SVG forward over the years. I think currently we're theoretically working on SVG2, but we'll get to that in a moment.

emeyer: And there's a lot of interest in Svg, honestly. Maybe more than sometimes people realize. It's known to be popular in web design, probably mostly due to, things like logos. It's always nice to have your logo scale up or down very smoothly. You know, buttons and navigation type links tend to be popular there.

emeyer: And it's consistently cited as a developer pain point. As I understand it, in the most recent state of HTML survey, it was like number 2, something like that. And it's a common Stack Overflow question topic. And <path>, for example, as of the last web almanac, the 2024 web almanac, The <path> element is in the top 10 most frequently used elements. It's number 9. It's more popular than <meta> or <ul> or <br> for that matter. in terms of frequency used. It's also currently the most popular color font format, although that share has declined over the past few years. It's still above 50%, but not by much. Other formats are starting to catch up there.

emeyer: But there seems to be quite a bit of inertia. Especially on the standard side, where there was a discussion that the working group would not even be rechartered in 2024, I think it was. It was rechartered for 2 years. This is all of the email that has gone over the public SVG Working Group mailing list since rechartering other than the mail that announced essentially rechartering. They were all this year and, you can see, basically, there are questions about: Hey, the working group got rechartered. Are we doing anything? The one on 20 January 2025 question was, essentially: what's the deal with SVG2? And then there were some emails earlier this month that were more or less resources and working group activities.

emeyer: That's unfortunate, in my opinion. And also it feels like, in a lot of ways, not a hundred percent, not fully, but in many ways, there's inaction on the developer side. On the implementer side, more specifically. SVG keeps getting proposed for the Interop project, and every year it gets passed. The various stakeholders in the Interop project don't rate it highly enough to make the cut. To be clear, for those of you, for anyone who's not familiar with Interop. Interop gets way more proposals than it could ever possibly take on. So there are proposals that and that the various stakeholders will say: Yeah, in a perfect world of infinite resources that would be really cool to take on. But we don't have that. And we have to make decisions. And SVG does not ever make the cut.

emeyer: And when it comes to investment. Yes, implementers do put in some work of implementation.

emeyer: But there's also a lot of outside funding. This is a a blog post from last year from the WPE WebKit project at Agalia that talks about the SVG Engine replacement for WebKit that Wix has been funding, and that other contracts have informed before Wix came on.

emeyer: And it's awesome that there are 3rd parties that are willing to fund development of SVG. But they they have to do that because there doesn't really seem to be investments... The investments aren't coming from inside the house. They're coming from outside the house, basically.

emeyer: To a certain extent, when it comes to trying to find some momentum, like, what are the alternatives to the current system, because what we have now seems to not be producing anything.

emeyer: Do we need to find a billionaire donor who's willing to fund a whole bunch of work or to donate money in such a way that more work can happen inside the W3C. Maybe a funding collective. The Servo collective is starting to gain some traction, starting to gain some momentum. It's not to the point of funding a full staff, but it is starting to pick up speed. There's a MathML collective that Igalia has worked with, that has pushed forward some MathML work. Although it had a couple of very generous individual donors that helped make that happen. Not billionaire donors but people who could put in a lot more money than I could afford, certainly, In order to make some of this happen. Do we look at grants? LNET, the Netherlands, in the Netherlands excuse me, has started doing grants. There's the Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany that has done some grant funding of various work.

emeyer: But in a way it's almost easier to ask, where could we find the money to fund work? The harder question is, where can we find time and energy to create momentum within the working group, within implementers, and that's really what this session is about is to brainstorm those sorts of things and see if we can figure out how do we make those sorts of things happen?

emeyer: What are some examples of successful momentum building that we could look to? What are some examples of maybe mistakes that were made, whatever the situation may be there.

emeyer: would love to hear ideas! So I'm going to stop the recording if I can find it. Well, I'll stop the share, and then I'll stop the recording. How's that.