SVG Tiny 1.2 Last Call Working Draft

Just a reminder that the deadline for review comments for SVG Tiny 1.2 Working Draft is only two days away (May 20, 2005).

I spent some time pouring over the document and nitpicking away, but I didn't get finished in time. Overall, the document seems in good shape. I have to cut the SVG Working Group a little slack because the SVG Tiny spec used to be a supplemental doc that was a specific profile of the SVG Full spec. However, in SVG 1.2 the paradigm has shifted such that SVG Tiny is its own complete language spec (and SVG Full will be an extension of SVG Tiny). I talked about this in the past too. Anyway, there must have been significant document merging, cutting, etc to re-arrange things so I can understand why some URLs are broken and some code samples include features that aren't even in SVG Tiny. They still need to be fixed though! 🙂

One problem I've seen with specifications (in general) is that they often contain many little errors and lack precision (i.e. are too ambiguous) and this results in more time on the user end trying to figure it out or post in mailing lists. Some may consider this anal-retentive, but I call it courtesy to the reader. Most importantly, if you're going to provide code samples or mathematical descriptions, they'd better be exact with no errors, otherwise you're just frustrating the user who has taken the time to try and understand what you're writing about. For this reason (and the fact that I can't contribute much else at this time), most of my comments are:

• typos (scattered throughout the doc)
• incorrect code examples/mathematical formulae (Sections 5.9.2, 7.7.3, and 7.7.4 have some errors in them)
• clarifications (Sections 5.1, 5.9.2, 5.9.3, 5.11, 9.3 and 9.4 could all use fleshing out)
• minor suggested improvements (Example 07_07.svg in Section 7.5 could be improved)

Submit your comments to the SVG W3C mailing list with prefix "[SVGMobile12]" in the subject. You can view archives of the mailing list (including all my comments) here. You can read my blog topics on SVG here.