Joint CSS and SVG Meeting
MinutesCSS Stroke and Fill Specification
The CSS working group would like to allow the use of the SVG ‘stroke’ and ‘fill’ properties on CSS text as well as other places in CSS (e.g. box border). They’ve created a prototype document that basically copies the SVG stroke and fill text adding the necessary parts to get it to work with CSS text. This document has been temporary called Text Decoration 4 (the title will certainly be changed). They’ve proposed converting the ‘stroke’ and ‘fill’ properties to short-hands. (A short-hand property allows setting multiple CSS properties at the same time.) They also would like to see the ‘stroke-alignment’ property implemented (this property allows one to stroke only the inside or only the outside of a shape). I pointed out the difficulty in actually defining how ‘stroke-alignment’ would work. The SVG WG moved some of the advance stroking properties out of the SVG 2 specification into an SVG Stroke module to avoid holding up the SVG 2 specification. (See my blog entry on this as well as the issues in the SVG Stroke module.) Other issues discussed were how glyphs are painted (‘paint-order’, ‘text-shadow’), multiple strokes/fills, dashing, and ‘text-decoration-fill/stroke’.Text Issues
Next we covered a whole slew of text issues I raised dealing with flowed text in SVG.Strategy for using CSS in SVG for wrapping
The first issue was to agree on how SVG and CSS are related. I presented my strategy: that HTML/CSS and SVG have there own methods to define an area to fill called the wrapping area. Once this area is defined, one uses CSS rules to fill it. Here is how one defines the wrapping area in both HTML/CSS and SVG:
The CSS/HTML code:<style> .wrapper { shape-inside: xxx; ... } .float-left { shape-outside: yyy; ... } .float-right { shape-outside: zzz; ... } </style> <div id="wrapper"> <div id="float-left"/> <div id="float-right"/> <p> Some text. </p> </div>The result:

Wrapped text in HTML. One starts with a wrapper <div>. The ‘shape-inside’ property on this <div> reduces the wrapping area to the circle. Two floats <div>s are defined, one on the left (green rectangle) and right (red rectangle). The area that the floats exclude is reduced by the half-ellipses defined by the ‘shape-outside’ property. The final wrapping area is the light blue shape.
<style> .my_text { shape-inside: xxx; shape-outside: yyy, zzz; ... } </style> <text id="my_text">Some text.</text>The result:

Wrapped text in SVG 2. One starts with a
How is the first line placed in a wrapped shape?
When the top of a wrapping area is not horizontal, how do you decide where the first line of text is placed?
Alternative solutions for where to start layout of the first line, from top to bottom: First place a chunk of text fits: No restrictions, Restricted to multiples of ‘line-height’, Restricted to multiples of half ‘line-height’.
Overflow text
What should happen when the shape isn’t big enough for all the text? This is mostly an issue for browsers where the user can specify a larger font (i.e. for accessibility reasons). CSS has an ‘overflow’ property that selects either clipping or scrolling. Neither of these is a great solution for SVG. The tentative solution in the CSS Shapes 2 specification of extending the <div> below the wrapping area doesn’t work for SVG. I proposed that there should be a means to expose the overflowed text, such as displaying it on hovering over the ellipses at the end of the displayed text. There was some interest in this. For the moment, the best solution is probably to explicitly not define what should happen, leaving it to a future time to specify the behavior. In reflecting on this after the meeting, I think one strategy is to suggest that authors provide an overflow region by adding an additional shape to the value of the ‘shape-inside’ property.How does text wrap in a shape with a doughnut hole or other feature that breaks a line into parts?
Since SVG can have arbitrary shapes, it is possible to create shapes that break a single text line into parts. How should these shapes be filled?
An example of a shape that breaks lines into parts.
Flowing into multiple shapes
The aborted SVG 1.2 specification allowed text to be flowed sequentially into multiple shapes. This is something that Inkscape implemented and I would like to see this ability preserved. The proposed CSS methods for doing this don’t work for SVG. I proposed giving the ‘shape-inside’ property a list of shapes. It was agreed that this would be an acceptable solution for SVG. (And it can provide a place for over-flowed text.)How is the first glyph positioned on a line?
When dealing with rectangles, it is straight forward to find the position of the first glyph but with arbitrary shapes it is more difficult. I asked what was the correct CSS method. I was told that one considers the glyph box extended upwards/downwards as dictated by using the height of the entire line box. (For example, if one has a ‘line-height’ value of 2 with a 16px font, the line box has a height of 32px.) It’s not clear where this is specified in CSS.Baseline issues
We next switch from text wrapping to baseline issues. Text is normally laid out along a baseline which can be different depending on the script. For example, western scripts normally use an Alphabetic baseline while Indic scripts use a Hanging baseline.Example baselines (red lines) in three different scripts. From left to right: alphabetic, hanging, ideographic. The EM box is shown in blue for the ideographic script.

Figure from the XSL 1.1 specification showing the default behavior upon ‘font-size’ change. The baseline table does not change.
The CSS ‘auto’ value has one small problem for SVG. With vertical text, if the value of ‘text-orientation’ is ‘sideways’, the alphabetic baseline is used. SVG 1.1 always uses the central baseline for vertical text. The CSS specification will be fixed to be compatible with SVG 1.1.
We also discussed default values for the various baselines. In principle, one gets the values of the baselines from the font but most fonts don’t have baseline tables; for interoperability we need defaults. It was decided that the CSS group would investigate this more and come up with a recommended set of default values.
Filters
I brought up a couple of issues dealing with SVG/CSS Filter Effects module. The first was the status of the document. Progress towards finishing this document seems to have stopped. Two of the three editors are no longer very active. The third editor was present and said he would push this through.
I was also interested in the next level as I have a filter primitive I would like to see added. It turns out that Level 2 has already been started. Not much is in there now. Apple, however, has a bunch of filter primitives they would like to add.
Next we covered the issue of artifacts created by using eight bit per channel colors (8 bpc) in the filter chain. The specification as written doesn’t directly specify that 8 bpc color should be used but a couple examples do assume this. I proposed that they be converted to use the range 0 to 1 so that one can use floats to describe color channels. This would solve the problem. Dean Jackson from Apple will investigate the possibility of requiring that floats be used rather than ints in the filter chain.

An example of the artifacts one gets due to using only 8 bit alpha channel bump map as the input into a lighting filter primitive.
Gradient Banding
An unplanned topic… how to get rid of banding in gradients. Dithering is a well known technique. Can dithering be added to CSS gradients? There seems to be support for this idea. The syntax and technique needs to be specified.SVG Meeting — Day 1
MinutesPath Stroking: Conformance
I brought up some time ago the inconstancy in how paths are stroked with the half the stroke width is greater than the radius of curvature (see my blog post). I suggested that maybe we define the proper way to stroke a path. Another SVG Working Group member took an action to research this topic more. He consulted members of the PDF standards group as well as hardware vendors. After he presented his findings we agreed that being more specific at this time wasn’t really a viable option as the way paths are stroked is such a fundamental property of the underlying graphics libraries that are used to render SVG.Fallback for the ‘arc’s Line Join
It has been noted that the currently specified fallback for the ‘arcs’ line join of a ‘miter’ join is less than idea. I presented a number of alternative options to the working group. They agreed to a change in the fallback to one of two possible fallbacks:Fallback options: Blue: increasing the radius of the inner arc to meet the outer arc. Red: increasing the radius of the inner arc while decreasing the radius of the outer arc until the two meet.
Path morphing
With the possible demise of SMIL animations, I asked what was the status of turning the path data attribute into a property so that it can be animated using CSS/Web Animations. The response was that it hasn’t been forgotten and that Chrome will soon have an implementation. (SMIL usage shot up dramatically after YouTube started to use SMIL to animate the Play/Pause button.) CSS path animation will be based on SVG 1.1’s path animation. A future version might include more flexible rules for path interpolation (at the moment, animated paths must have the same number and type of path commands).SVG Meeting — Day 2
Minutes (Some minutes missing due to operator error…. The meeting crossed midnight GMT which confuses the minute making bot.)Presentation Attributes
SVG has the idea of presentation attributes. These are attributes that can also be set using CSS. Recently, we’ve promoted quite a few geometric attributes to be presentation attributes to allow setting them with CSS (it does seem a bit strange to “style” the position of a rectangle… but that is what we’ve enabled). As we add new properties, should these also be turned into presentation attributes? It is a bit of a maintenance burden to ensure all new properties are also presentation attributes, especially as we adopt a plethora of new text properties. We have already decided to require CSS so there is not necessarily a need for new presentation attributes. HTML has already deprecated/removed presentation attributes in favor of CSS. After a bit of discussion, we have decided to follow HTML’s lead.Other Topics
Topics covered included how SVG is integrated into HTML, coordinate precision in generated content, and aligning dashes to corners. As mentioned earlier, we decided to create a ‘shape-subtract’ property rather than misuse the ‘shape-outside’ property. Most of the afternoon was spent with specification editing.SVG Meeting — Day 3
This was a specification editing day. (It is extremely useful to have the working group present when editing as any issues that arise can be immediately dealt with.)
Just wanted to say thank you, both for your work in Inkscape, and taking on the problem of making standards both sane and useful. If you’ve ever wondered if anyone reads theses blog posts full of committee meeting discussion, I’m here to say at least one person does!
On technical matters, CSS everywhere seems to be all the rage. We’ve recently been writing some code that uses CSS3 to specify book-level “styling” changes (using move-to, copy-to and pending ), that historically I’d have considered the domain of XSLT. Seems the new trend.
Thanks for attending and for the report! I’m glad to know about the deprecation of presentation attributes, and am looking forward to seeing the different line join types in action.
The SVG format should not be too much dependent on web standards like CSS.
As you may already know, the SVG format is now used widely in mobile applications both on Android and on iOS. Due to the device independent quality of SVG, and to the unnumerable varieties of screen dpi, ratios and resolutions in mobile devices, developers are now sistematically dropping bitmaps assets and replacing them with SVG assets.
It is now clear that SVG is going to become the de facto standard for vector graphics interchange in a variety of fields: mobile apps UI (are all migrating to vector graphics now, dropping PNG for vector drawables), videogames (2D games on both portable and home consoles are almost all made with vector graphics this days and often originally created in the SVG format and converted to an internal format), cartoons and youtube animations ( a lot of video applications for animations editing used by popular youtube channels import SVG now for both backgrounds and animation frames), professional cartoon animations studios (there are many professional software art tools for creating animations but they have an hard time when it cames to exchange data and files. SVG is now increasingly used as an universal export format for vector graphics and a bridge between all those tools). SVG should not be limited to the web and the browser. To make SVG an independent and self sufficient vector file format it should not rely on external javascript libraries or applications specifications.
For example it should provide it’s own animation markup language, and this is what it already did with the absolutely excellent SMIL (the best timesynched animation format ever, able to be perfectly reproduced everywhere without loosing neither animation and audio syncronization).
Why on earth is SMIL going to be dropped? This is the most stupid choice ever for the WG. Especially now that, with tools like Adobe Animate CC and plugins like Flash2svg ( https://github.com/TomByrne/Flash2Svg ) you can export almost all animations + sound as a single SVG file, like this one amazing cartoon episode:
http://www.tbyrne.org/portfolio/smil/LoveDota.svg
SMIL would be paramount in the future for mobile app coponents animations. On iOS and Android, buttons and UI components are already made with animated SVG.
Even crossplatform frameworks like Xamarin are now using SVG. Read this article for example:
http://blog.twintechs.com/explorations-in-cross-platform-assets-xamarin-forms
As you can see they cannot use the CSS border size attribute to scale the svg like on the web. SVG should provide 9-slice scaling in the format itself, not pretending to use CSS like a browser was present.
There is a world outside the browser that uses SVG. Please tell the WG to consider it when working on the next specs. Thank you!