Post-Convention Thoughts

The conference is over. The only major thing that I missed out of it was Chris Lilley's Q&A session, Chris of course being the chair of the W3C Graphics group. I was privileged to catch the SVG W3C Working Group this morning, answering a number of questions from the audience about the state of the W3C specification. More about those questions in a moment.

I did want to make an observation that occurred to me in light of our stay in Japan. The people of Japan are remarkably homogenous, a cliche so obvious that I began to wonder some about it. Last night I was in the Ginza district, watching as the Sararimen headed away from their respective places of work when it hit me. If you watched which building they emerged from, a pattern began to emerge. There were subtle variations in the way that the men dressed, and more obvious variations among the women, but in all cases the variations were the same for each buildings inhabitants. This echoed the more obvious uniforms that people in service professions from banking to food service to airline workers seemed to have.

Japan was, of course, famous for its feudal society, a society that theoretically changed to a more democratic form in the 1850s. However, what I noticed was that in many ways Japan has become one of the world's most striking examples of post-modern feudalism. The Shogun of medieval Japan now wears Armani suits and his castle, instead of bearing distinctive colors, now bears logos such as Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, NEC, Sony, and so forth and tower over the landscape as skyscrapers. Higher level functionaries within each Shogun's court wear suits of a certain cut and style as well, typically of the same type as that of the CEO but never as expensive or elegantly tailored. The mid-level female management (women never get into the highest levels of management, from what I've seen) typically wear skirts of a certain length and color, and the bandeau seems to be pretty much pervasive, serving as much an identifier as any court colors. The lower the social position, the more obvious that the mode of dressing is a uniform. Significantly, once you move away from the work world, the homogeneity in dress goes away, though fashion still holds its own sway.

Lest some think I'm Japan-bashing, I see this phenomenon occuring in many other places in the world (including, distressingly, in the US) -- it's more pronounced and obvious in Japan, but the concept of corporation as feudal overlord does rather explain entirely too many problems in the world.

So what does this have to do with the metaphorical web? Watching the process and interactions of the Working Group Members this morning, I thought about that obvservation, and about the fact that the "voting members" of the working group are all affiliated with some company (I don't believe that Invited Experts can vote, but I may be wrong about this). At one point during the cruise a couple of nights ago, Chris Lilley lamented to me that if he could have any new element at all in SVG, it would be nurbs. While I personally agree - nurbs are remarkably effective at building complex shapes without the requirement of working out complex arcs and segments - this raised the question in my mind about why Lilley, who heads up this organization, couldn't get such an obviously useful shape through the group.

The formal members of any W3C working group represent companies. Some, such as Jon Ferraiolo (?) of Adobe, have an incredible degree of latitude in being able to make decisions in the name of Adobe, while others have almost no real say whatsoever - they are there solely as a voice to object to something which may have a negative impact for a given company. I think that this tends to be one of the reason why it takes so long for any changes into a developing working draft to gain approval - the ramifications of such changes have to be passed up into the corporations, with the attendant issues of politics that his always brings. Of course, it is unlikely that most changes in the specifications require going all the way up to the top, (though I could see certain individual CEOs, such as Bill Gates, being very interested in such details) but the changes nonetheless reflect the reality of our global post-modern feudalism.

Okay, too much of a diversion. What we did glean from the often cryptic mutterings of the diplomatic emmissaries of the standards world:

1. XPath is making its way into the SVG DOM, modelled after the DOM 3 XPath specifications. I'm doing a happy dance about this one. An XPath implementation ends up eliminating a lot of unnecessary tree-walking code, can provide searches based upon ambiguous intermediate nodes in a transformation, and can do a certain level of text processing. I'd be happier if they were mandating XPath 2, but that will come in time.
2. Low level sockets are also being built into the SVG DOM, along with a slight variation of the XMLHTTPRequest object. Dean Jackson, who graciously talked with me afterwards on many of these issues, indicated that while he knew there would likely be some pushback ("This doesn't belong in a Graphics Standard," is something that he's heard many times), the ability to more precisely control the bindings for content within a distributed environment more than outweighed its rejection upon categorical grounds.
3. Arcs are still being debated. This has been one of the most commonly requested features of SVG practically from its inception, and frankly even they acknowledged that the current path arc specification is too complex and difficult to work with properly. There was a tendency to want to place it into the "you can create arc support with sXBL" but I think this approach needs to be approached VERY carefully. You can create circles, rectangles, ellipses, and so forth with path commands as well, but their obvious utility makes them prime candidates for being made as privileged elements. I've wondered more than once if the better solution, rather than creating a privileged "arc" element, would be to add startSweep and endSweep parameters to the circle and ellipse elements (and perhaps on all privileged elements with the exception of <path>. This would essentially draw a path (and associated radial fill) from the startSweep angle to the endSweep angle; the behavior is similar to that which already exists in but it is more intuitive.
4. Much of the effort within the SVG group is now centered on sXBL, which many see as the infrastructure layer necessary to provide the critical mapping between low level graphic primitives and high level graphical componentes. I've talked at length previously about the debate between the CSS and XPath side, and offered at least one solution to the dilemma. Within Microsoft's XML implementation there is an intriguing concept of being able to assign, when an XML document is created, the inherent selection language used. This is designed in part to provide backward-compatibility support for XML Patterns, their XPath precursor, but the idea has some potential here as well. A selectionLangage attribute on the element could serve as an indicator of the current selection language (with it defaulting to XPath 1.0); this attribute could additionally support a CSS selector system if the underlying environment supports it, or XPath2 when that language becomes supported. I'll be pushing this suggestion back into the SVG circles.
5. Communication protocols between the W3C and the rest of us were discussed. There is, on the W3C's part a sense that there may be something of a disconnect with the rest of the community (a point on which I agree) and ideas were discussed on how to improve commuinication, include their responding in part to the queries. My own take on this (and something that I think should be discussed for ALL working groups) is the idea of appointing a Public Relations Officer, someone who would act as a point of contact with the W3C, would insure that there was some communication going out the other way and would be able to act as an aggregator for the various websites in conjunction with the web editor. I'd appreciate hearing other ideas from you as well on this - how would you go about improving communication with the W3C, on both ends of the process.

Okay, I'm back stateside, waiting for the flight from San Francisco to Seattle, and from there to take care of the kids from my long-suffering wife. Until later, domo arigato gozaimashita for reading my blog.

-- Kurt Cagle