A blog about Inkscape, SVG, and other worldly matters…
SVG 2: Now is the time to act!
The SVG working group is close to finishing a review of all the proposed new features for SVG 2. This is the time to make your voice heard if you want something added to the specification!
While a final SVG 2 standard is probably two years away, things can show up in browsers earlier. SVG 2 will consist of a core standard plus modules and references to other standards, especially those from CSS 3, some of which are already approved or are close to being approved. You can now use CSS 3 Colors inside SVG in browsers. This allows, for example, describing a color in terms of HSL as I’ve done in the example below:
Appearing relatively soon will be CSS 3 Transforms which includes both 2D and 3D transforms. All the major browsers already support 2D transforms in HTML with Firefox and Chrome supporting some 3D transforms (at the moment one must use browser specific prefixes but that should change in the next couple of months). Expect this support to extend to SVG in the near future. (Hover over the box below! All done with CSS!)
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There are a number of items that Inkscape users and developers have expressed interest in seeing added to the SVG specificaition. If you have something you want to see added, leave a comment. There are some things that the SVG working group is open to adding but nobody in the group is willing to spend much time on them. If someone in the community were to step up, the likelihood that they would be added would be much greater. One item in this catagory is connectors.
10 thoughts on “SVG 2: Now is the time to act!”
Are clipping and masking currently in the new spec?
Looked at that link and saw clipping referred to once, but it wasn’t quite clear if they were talking about clipping, in the way that Inkscape refers to clipping.
SVG already includes masking and clipping, which is exactly what Inkscape implements.
It would be nice if align of stroke shop up in specs. I mean inner, middle and outer stroke of object.
The abiity to place the stroke inside/outside a fill is already approved by working group. See the Stroke Position requirement.
Any ideas on the status of CMYK colour space? Or is this rather something that should be implemented in the CSS standard first?
I am not the Inkscape color expert so I am not the person to ask. From a standards perspective, probably of more importance is ICC color profiles which was dropped from the CSS 3 Color specification but is mentioned in the spec as something people should implement (see the section Call for Implementations of dropped features).
SVG 1.1 already has support for calibrated CMYK using the icc-color() syntax.
SVG2 builds on that support (for example by adding Lab as an interpolation colorspace).
Hi Tavmjong!
My sincerest apologies if this is already covered in the 2.0 spec and I didn’t see it–I did some rudimentary searching and didn’t see it mentioned, but I may be searching on the wrong terms –
One thing that I wish Inkscape in particular had was the notion of multiple pages within the same SVG document. Is the concept of multi-page SVGs something that the spec currently covers or is planned to cover? It looks like the 1.2 spec did have something along those lines but I don’t see it in the 2.0 discussions and notes I’ve looked through thus far.
Thanks,
~m
You are right, it was missing. It is something the working group has talked about in the past. I’ve added it to the list of proposed items for SVG2. See the SVG2 Requirements Input Page.
Are clipping and masking currently in the new spec?
Looked at that link and saw clipping referred to once, but it wasn’t quite clear if they were talking about clipping, in the way that Inkscape refers to clipping.
SVG already includes masking and clipping, which is exactly what Inkscape implements.
It would be nice if align of stroke shop up in specs. I mean inner, middle and outer stroke of object.
The abiity to place the stroke inside/outside a fill is already approved by working group. See the Stroke Position requirement.
Any ideas on the status of CMYK colour space? Or is this rather something that should be implemented in the CSS standard first?
I am not the Inkscape color expert so I am not the person to ask. From a standards perspective, probably of more importance is ICC color profiles which was dropped from the CSS 3 Color specification but is mentioned in the spec as something people should implement (see the section Call for Implementations of dropped features).
SVG 1.1 already has support for calibrated CMYK using the icc-color() syntax.
SVG2 builds on that support (for example by adding Lab as an interpolation colorspace).
Hi Tavmjong!
My sincerest apologies if this is already covered in the 2.0 spec and I didn’t see it–I did some rudimentary searching and didn’t see it mentioned, but I may be searching on the wrong terms –
One thing that I wish Inkscape in particular had was the notion of multiple pages within the same SVG document. Is the concept of multi-page SVGs something that the spec currently covers or is planned to cover? It looks like the 1.2 spec did have something along those lines but I don’t see it in the 2.0 discussions and notes I’ve looked through thus far.
Thanks,
~m
You are right, it was missing. It is something the working group has talked about in the past. I’ve added it to the list of proposed items for SVG2. See the SVG2 Requirements Input Page.