Mozilla SVG Update: What SVG bugs can't you live with for a year?

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August 9, 2007

What SVG bugs can't you live with for a year?

The gecko feature freeze for Firefox 3 has arrived, and though we're still seeing whether we can include a few new items, attention now shifts to bug fixing before the release later this year. To make the best use of the resources available, we would like to know what bugs are most important to SVG content developers.

Please download a nightly build and see what things you find are broken and that would hurt if not fixed for another year (rough timetable for a future Firefox release). Comment on this blog entry or file a bug.

Posted by tor at August 9, 2007 4:34 PM

Comments

Are there any reftests, xpcshell tests or mochikit tests for SVG? That might help determine what's most badly needed.

Posted by: Alex Vincent at August 9, 2007 5:44 PM

We have a small number of reftests and the style system mochitests for all the svg properties.

Posted by: tor at August 9, 2007 5:47 PM

Text scaling in html elements embedded in a svg:foreignObject is still broken. I filed this awhile ago as bug 383408.

Posted by: at August 9, 2007 5:59 PM

How about bug 231179? It would be nice to be able to use an SVG wherever you can currently use PNG.

Posted by: Steve K at August 9, 2007 6:44 PM

Steve K: that would be considered a new svg feature, one that we don't have code in-hand for, so the tree freeze schedule means that will need to wait until a future release.

Posted by: tor at August 9, 2007 7:23 PM

Tim
The nightlies the last week or so have had major crashes on
http://www.lrcwe-data.com/UDFCD.svg
I never field a bug report since it looked a lot like the onload regression you had a few months back. I have been sending the crash reports to Mozilla.
Bruce

Posted by: Bruce at August 9, 2007 7:52 PM

Bruce: looking at the stacks for reported crashes on lrcwe-data, it appears that problem might be fixed by a checkin today by vlad for bug 390668.

Posted by: tor at August 9, 2007 8:13 PM

Any foreignObject bugs would be my pick.

Specifically I have been having problems using contenteditable html within foreignObject and flash within foreignObject. However it may be that the problems I am experiencing are caused by other modules.

Posted by: daniel at August 9, 2007 10:09 PM

I could live without bug 310326.

It is RESOLVED WORKSFORME, but it doesn't wfm on Linux with latest nightly.

Posted by: johnst at August 9, 2007 10:59 PM

bug 353460 (SVG image has no horizontal scrollbar) is very anoying.
It is already marked blocking1.9+ though.

Posted by: Florian at August 10, 2007 2:59 AM

Tim
It looks like the fix for bug 390668 solved my problem. Thanks!

Posted by: Bruce at August 10, 2007 7:30 PM

Definitely some default user interface for zooming and panning. I've heard it so many times -> putting some scheme on page and do not bother with link to some full-screen version -> just let people to zoom it when necessary. Very useful with ASV and other implementations...

Posted by: Marek at August 12, 2007 7:54 PM

It'd be nice to use SVG as HTML/CSS images even if it was just rendering them as bitmaps first. I guess it'll have to wait.

Posted by: ant at August 12, 2007 9:30 PM

Bug 348755 has an outdated patch, but it's a very simple fix, according to JWatt. I don't have the time right now to set up my environment to create a new patch, so I'd appreciate if you could take a look at it.

Posted by: Doug Schepers at August 13, 2007 12:21 AM

Disregard my last request (bug 348755). I found a workaround, so you should spend your time on worthier matters. This one can wait.

Posted by: Doug Schepers at August 13, 2007 9:53 AM

Bug 369400 is one I really could live without - getBBBox() with large coordinates in a viewBox is somehow crucial in mapping apps. FF draws such scenarios correctly, so why not report dimensions accurate as well?

Posted by: Klaus F�rster at August 13, 2007 5:43 PM

I don't care about SVG at all until I can use it from within CSS. Such a shame all this work (and potential eye candy) is going to waste for anyone who values the separation of style from semantics.

Posted by: Chris Hubick at August 14, 2007 7:25 PM

Chris, are you talking about using SVG as a CSS background-image? Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're talking about (you can style SVG with CSS right now)...

Posted by: Jeff Schiller at August 15, 2007 12:48 PM

Yes, I am talking about: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231179

I am an ardent web standards supporter, and write purely semantic pages, and do _all_ my styling/theming via CSS and image replacement. I have been following all the *great* SVG work in Mozilla for years (I hate Flash), but it does me no good until it's accessible via CSS. I don't author many pages with bar charts or anything where you would put the SVG as actual content of the page... In truth, I really just want it for making a site look great (presentational/CSS type stuff) and that does so both on my cell phone and my 30" Dell LCD.

And even if I wanted to compromise on using CSS, and code images right into the page, then I hit bugs like:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=294120

Those two bugs, both keeping me from leveraging SVG, are my main peeves with Firefox. The latter one blocks a bug I filed, like, 7 years ago when I first tried to use SVG on a site:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70978
See the attachment for a description of how it keeps me from using SVG:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=218888

I really don't know how other people are using SVG in their pages - you have implemented a *scalable* graphics format, but it's almost impossible to include it on a page (CSS bug), or in a way which actually allows you to leverage the fact it will scale (ratio bug).

I'm a huge fan of the technology, and of Firefox, so I will continue to wait patiently so that I can leverage all of your effort. Both those bugs missed Firefox 3, so I will hunker down for yet another year or two and wait... if it even makes it for Firefox 4 it will still then be over a decade from when I first learned SVG to when I can use it on an actual web page (*cries*).

Posted by: Chris Hubick at August 16, 2007 6:13 PM

H folks,
what's quite frustrating for me is not only possibility to open SVG via IMG tag in HTML), but the same for IMAGE tag inside SVG. Opening small clips as images inside SVG is great functionality I've plenty usage for, but it's working sufficiently only under ASV now, no other browser seems to be able to implement it yet :-((
I will be great to have it working!!!

Posted by: George at August 20, 2007 5:58 AM

Looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=294120 blocks several bugs related to SVG...

Posted by: Jeff Schiller at August 21, 2007 2:32 PM