SVG Tiny Compliance

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It'd be a nice feather in the cap to be able to declare full compliance to one of the SVG specs. SVG Tiny is a good thing to aim for. A number of developers have voiced support for trying to achieve this.

As a first glance without looking much at either the spec or inkscape source, I believe we need the following: don't rely on style attributes working (use fill=... attributes); switch; SVG fonts; animation.

In more detail:

Styling:

  • We must write `fill="..." etc. attributes instead of using style="fill:...". (I.e. when writing SVG Tiny documents, we must not use style attributes -- or at least use only "redundant" style attributes if that's easier to implement.)

<switch>:

  • Minimum requirement is that we render it correctly (e.g. as a viewer would, showing just one child). Interface for viewing other branches would be nice (perhaps a non-modal dialog box listing the children named by their requiredFeatures, requiredExtensions and systemLanguage attributes. The layers dialog box may be a good base.

SVG fonts: font, font-face, font-face-src, font-face-name, missing-glyph, glyph:

  • massifr has started work on this. He's still new to inkscape source code, so could use guidance.

Anchors (<a>):

  • Especially relevant to Inkview. Inkscape can create <a> elements with right-click on an existing item, and has a textual dialog box for filling in attribute values (object-attributes.cpp). We have a "follow link" item in the contextual menu, but it does nothing (object-ui.cpp:sp_anchor_link_follow).

Animation: animate, animateColor, animateMotion, animateTransform, mpath, set:

  • My reading is that we can't claim to support all of SVG Tiny without supporting animation.
  • See Animation-(Timeline) for implementation notes.

(<foreignObject>: I believe we don't need to do anything to support the foreignObject element. We already have the property of not discarding unrecognized elements like foreignObject and its children.)


Looking back at the full SVG (1.1) spec, is Inkscape already able to claim to be a "Conforming SVG Generator", for which I think lack of animation/filtering features would not be a problem (it seems to me that it doesn't matter what features you support, as long the generated file is valid SVG) but compliance with the Priority 1 accessibility guidelines from the "Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0" would be necessary. http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/access.html outlines how accessibility applies to SVG. Some low-hanging fruit would be better support for title and desc elements (e.g. from the Object Properties dialog box) and the xml:lang attribute for text spans (whose initial implementation could be as simple as a textbox in the Text&Font dialog box).

We would not, however, be able to claim to be a "Conforming Static SVG Interpreter" or "Conforming Static SVG Viewer" until more features were supported, e.g. filters and SVG fonts.


Research

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