MRmromanuk·Mar 28, 2025Submission
SVG v2 advanced 1% in 6 years: now is at 44% completion
2 points · Open discussionw3c
svgwg
Bikeshed2016–2025
w3c / svgwg
svgwg
SVG Working Group specifications
8Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
778GitHub stars
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SVG Working Group specifications
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-08-09 13:30:43 UTC to 2025-03-28 12:39:17 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesSVG v2 is stuck at 43% since 2019
16 points · Open discussion<foreignObject> is a required part of SVG; but specific foreign namespaces like HTML, well, they’re not part of the spec at all; it just so happens that browsers all implement the same obvious but unspecified behaviour. In fact, the spec’s quite silly on the point of HTML in SVG, because you should be able to do something like this to use HTML in renderers that support that and fall back to SVG text otherwise:
<switch>
<foreignObject requiredExtensions="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">…</div>
</foreignObject>
<text>…</text>
</switch>
… except that no values for requiredExtensions were ever specified, so including this attribute will make some HTML-capable renderers use the fallback, and omitting it will cause all correct SVG renderers to use the <foreignObject> (rendering not
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hing if they don’t support the HTML namespace) and ignore the <text>. Quite why they preemptively didn’t declare XML namespaces valid extensions, I don’t know; not doing so rendered the entire feature uselessly broken for its main intended use case! (I dunno, maybe all browsers implement requiredExtensions="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" now; the thread at https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/track/issues/2053 talks of Amaya emitting it and Firefox not liking it back in 2008, and https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues/138 talks of Firefox accepting it in 2016. I haven’t tested anything.)
—⁂—
To do manual word wrapping, you have two main choices:
(a) If it’s acceptable to use HTML at conversion time, Range does all you need, with Range.getClientRects on a range spanning an element returning more than one value if wrapping has occurred, and then you can do something like binary search on the process to find the point of line break, or you can get cleverer if you like to speed it up.
(b) If not, you’ll need to embed at least an OpenType font loader and shaper. HarfBuzz is a good choice for this, with a WASM version readily available (among other options); https://harfbuzz.github.io/harfbuzzjs/ demonstrates it. There are at least three pretty decent options in Rust, too (in alphabetical order: Allsorts, RustyBuzz, Swash), and a few immature libraries covering more to do with rich text formatting (including wrapping) rather than just stopping at shaping.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of at least one full HTML-to-SVG renderer that ran in the browser, too, used in such places as filing bug reports to take a “screenshot” of the page. HTML → PDF → SVG is very probably a more practical path for this in your case.
There were serious issues with the way HTML was done at W3C, and this agreement between W3C and the WHATWG is a good thing.
However, all W3C specs are developed in the open, nowadays on github, and feedback from anyone anywhere is taken seriously. Don't like something about css? go here: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues. Something wrong with SVG? https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues. An issue with the Payment Handler API? https://w3c.github.io/payment-handler/. Dislike the way W3C itself works? That's here: https://github.com/w3c/w3process
Yes, the W3C is a membership based organization, and if you want to vote for instance on who gets to be on its Advisory Board, or have a say in the Charter of Working Groups, you need to be a member, and pay.
For the WHATWG, you don't get to vote on who's on the Steering Group, and you don't ge
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t a say on what new Workstreams are started / changed / stopped, even if you did want to pay. That's up to Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla. Sure anybody can suggest stuff (but that's true at the W3C too), but they decide, and there's no way into that club.
Not to claim that W3C is perfect. Plenty of improvements are needed. But claiming that small business or individuals cannot participate just isn't true.
SVG 2 adds a big pile of stuff, some of which seems completely unnecessary to me, https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/wiki/SVG-2-new-features
But it doesn’t fundamentally change the concept, which as I said is to be a 1990s-style XML-based document format with a bunch of (frankly inconsistent and arbitrary) graphical elements in it, based on a 1970s drawing model. YMMV.
It’s great that it exists because browsers don’t give web authors any alternative method to match many of its capabilities. But it’s just as much of a confusing and frustrating mess as all the other web specs.
In The Trouble with D3Note that SVG 1.1 doesn't have an option for color interpolation to work in premultiplied/associated alpha. SVG 2 is not finalized though, I added an issue some time ago.
https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues/303
It affects gradients, animations and imported+scaled raster images. Maybe other stuff too, I don't know.
In Beware of Transparent PixelsSVG also has more risk: stored XSS, which isn't something you'd expect from a file whose MIME type starts with "image/".
https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/issues/266
In SVG has more potential