For the past three-and-a-half years of my life, I have devoted a large portion of my time and creativity to the creature known as SVG. Whether that was a good choice or not, I do not know. But here I am. However, I'm not really sure where I'm going to go next. And I'm even less sure where SVG is going next. So I sat down to write out my thoughts about the future of SVG, and instead wrote about how I came to be so tangled up with it.
It started with data visualization. I was looking for a niche skill that I could use to distinguish myself as a journalist. The previous year had been particularly bad for me health-wise, and I found that writing was particularly difficult when I was tired. I was enjoying photography and photo-editing, but photojournalism requires the ability to hop in a car and head to where the story is, when the story is. I don't even drive. I needed a job that I could work remotely, on a flexible schedule.
But I have a background in computer science, which most journalism grads can't claim. (I have a B.Sc. in Bioinformatics, and at the time I was procrastinating on finishing my Master of Journalism thesis.) And my goal with journalism was always to improve the communication of technical and scientific data in the news. I loved the idea of using our new communication media to improve the understanding of data and scientific evidence. Data visualization was just right for me.
I started learning D3.js, after a little research convinced me it had the best mix of flexibility and convenience. I read Mike Bostock's and Scott Murray's tutorials. Eventually, I started stalking the d3 tag on StackOverflow: not asking questions, but answering them. I'd see a problem that I thought should be easy to answer, and I worked on it until I could.
Of course, you can't go far with D3.js without learning something about the fundamental web technologies that it builds on: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and SVG. Just when I was busy trying to figure out basic CSS layout, I came across the CSSOff challenge: recreate an over-designed Photoshop comp layout as a responsive, progressively enhanced website. The final submissions were submitted via CodePen. I wasn't ready to commit until I was sure I'd have something to submit, so I didn't sign up until the last minute. By then, it was too late for the "free Pro-account for the duration of the contest" offer, and I had to host all my images on a site which apparently no longer exists, but you can still sort-of get a feel of the design. I made heavy use of SVG clip-paths and filters to implement the graphical effects.
Now that I had the CodePen account, I started using it now and then. Eventually (aka the first half of 2014), I started creating detailed tutorial-style pens (this was before CodePen blog posts existed), explaining things like how quadratic Bézier curves are constructed.
(Aside: A moment of laughter for the note at the end of that tutorial, about how animations and cubic curve discussion are still "under construction".)
These tutorials somehow caught the eye of David Eisenberg, who was working on the Second Edition of SVG Essentials for O'Reilly Media. The First Edition had been published in 2002 and it was the reference book on SVG. I was commissioned to do a technical review.
I dove into the job a little too deep. Instead of just pointing out errors, I gave detailed comments suggesting new wording, or additional topics of dicussion (particularly regarding browser compatibility issues that I'd come across). When David started integrating my suggestions, and realizing how much of my words he was using verbatim, he had the decency to suggest that I'd be listed as a co-author, with a corresponding slice of the royalties.
But me being that type of person that I am, that only dragged me deeper. My name was going to be on the cover, now: I had skin in the game. I wanted this to be the book I was looking for when I was learning, and started working on some of those additional topics I'd felt were missing.
There were a few months of vigorous back-and-forth between the two of us that summer. The manuscript was considerably re-organized. My Master's thesis was delayed yet again. But by October, it was published! A classic O'Reilly animal-themed tech book, with "Amelia Bellamy-Royds" as an author.
Shortly thereafter, I got another offer from the editor at O'Reilly that we'd been working with. They had another manuscript, and it needed some help. The author (Kurt Cagle) had since moved on to other things, and wasn't able to finish it. Would I be interested in taking it on, polishing it up for publication?
I warned that I wouldn't take on any new commitments until the thesis was done (finally! in December 2014), but I'd read over what they had and make a proposal.
At that time, the book was title HTML 5 Graphics. But the manuscript was mostly about SVG, with one very out-of-date chapter on CSS 3, and nothing about HTML canvas. Kurt had been working on it for five years, and the tech had moved on from under him.
It was going to need a lot of work to get it ready for publication. It was going to need even more work to make it something that wasn't just a duplication of SVG Essentials.
In my opinion, the best and most unique aspects of Kurt's manuscript were that it focused on SVG integrated with other web technologies (HTML and CSS), and that it used complex, visually compelling examples. (As much as I love the simplicity of the examples in David's book, most of them aren't exactly eye candy.)
So I proposed working with that: a book about SVG on the web, with big full-colour illustrations to show off SVG's full potential. It would have lots of warnings about browser support, and practical workaround strategies. It would also be future-focused, with information about new proposals or experimental features. And it would emphasize how SVG compared and contrasted—and collaborated—with CSS in web design.
We re-named it Using SVG with CSS3 and HTML5. I was going to be working with Kurt's manuscript and examples, but fleshing them out and re-arranging them as need be.
I estimated it would take me 4–6 months working full time (or as close to full time as I was able). I arranged for four $1000 advances to be paid out as the manuscript was completed, in return for a reduced royalty rate. It wouldn't be a proper wage, but it would be enough to get by. I was doing a little bit of freelance technical writing, and I had some money in the bank that my grandfather had left me. And my husband had just got a job after most of the year on disability—it was out of town, but that was kind of a good thing at that point. The book would be a change of direction after the Master's thesis, as I decided what to do next.
I am notoriously bad at estimating project timelines. Six months later, I was slightly more than halfway through my planned topic list, and nearly twice my planned page count.
Some re-calculation was required. Clearly, my book couldn't be everything to everyone. The breaking point was when I spent a week and a half on the SVG text layout chapter, and realized at the end I had over 100 pages. That could be a book in itself. And it was.
After discussing with my editors, the decision was made to slice off some of the more in-depth sections of the manuscript into their own books. They would be aimed at developers who already work with SVG, but wanted to explore some of the lesser-known features.
Out of everything I'd already written, there were two topics that I decided had the potential to stand on their own: SVG text and SVG paint servers (patterns and gradients). Since they were already mostly written, they would be the focus. Get them published, then go back to the rest of the book. Using SVG would be streamlined for a more general audience
Summer 2015 was spent on the two books: SVG Colors, Patterns & Gradients came out in October, and SVG Text Layout was published in November. More beautiful O'Reilly animal books with my name on the cover! These ones even had colour figures. But I couldn't really celebrate, because I still had the longer book waiting to be finished.
And I'd now spent a year on the books, with very little income during that time. My husband and I had separated in September, and I was now carefully counting my budget every month. When O'Reilly sent me beautiful framed copies of the two books' covers, I cried thinking of how much they cost to frame and ship, and what else I could have done with that money. I still haven't even opened the second box.
Winter 2015–16 was not a good time for me. I'd been working full-tilt on the books, and needed a bit of a break. I'd also spent the previous year not avoiding any long-term plans until I could decide whether those plans would involve my husband or not, and now that that had been decided, there was a giant gaping "What next?" left in its wake. As we hit the dark days of winter here in the far Northern hemisphere, my chronic fatigue was taking over. One month break from the book turned into two, turned into three.
In spring 2016, I asked Dudley Storey to join the book as a co-editor, after an SVG book that he'd been writing (and I'd been tech-reviewing) for another publisher was cancelled. In addition to just having another pair of hands to lighten the load, I hoped that working with someone else would help keep me on track. But by that time, half my attention was barelling down a completely separate track.
Let's rewind a bit…
The books weren't the only way I was getting tangled up with SVG.
Over the time I had been working on the books, I had become involved with SVG standardization work. When I first decided that Using SVG would include forward-focused discussions of new proposals, I figured that I'd better find out what new proposals there were. I signed up to the W3C's www-svg mailing list to keep track of work on the highly-anticipated SVG 2 spec.
A month later (December 2014) a call went out for participants in a new task force on SVG Accessibility. Now, as I mentioned at the top, my interest in SVG comes from an interest in technical communication. SVG's accessibility issues are communication barriers. If SVG is going to be an effective communication medium, that needs to be fixed. I replied that I would be following their work, and would contribute in whatever unofficial capacity I could.
But of the people who were joining up in an official capacity, there weren't really that many with significant SVG knowledge. W3C staff rep (at the time) Doug Schepers asked if I'd like to join the task force officially, as a W3C Invited Expert.
I had gotten to know Doug earlier in 2014 from contributing to the Web Platform Docs project, a (now defunct) effort to create a browser-neutral reference for web developers. (It's defunct because MDN shifted to serve the purpose, and WPD wasn't able to shift fast enough to any purpose that distinguished it from MDN, so the other browser & tech companies eventually stopped funding it.) So he knew I had no problem jumping in and getting work done if I knew how to help.
A W3C "Task Force" can't invite its own experts, so I was assigned to the main SVG Working Group. I initially wasn't planning on doing any work for the main group, but I did start listening in to the weekly teleconferences. Even before joining the group officially, I had already been participating on the mailing list threads. And inevitably, when you bring up problems that need fixing—and especially if you start proposing solutions—people start asking you to do the work. Over the course of 2015, I slowly but steadily became a more active member in the group. I even got to meet some working group members in person, at the Libre Graphics meeting in Toronto in April 2015 and at the Graphical Web conference in Pittsburgh in September 2015.
Late 2015 to early 2016 was also not a good time for the SVG Working Group. The deadline for finishing SVG 2 kept on getting pushed back: from August 2015, to February 2016, to maybe mid-2016, or as soon as possible, anyway.
The problem was that there weren't a lot of people able and interested in doing the work. The two chairs, Cam McCormack and Erik Dahlström, had both switched jobs (Cam by choice, Erik by corporate layoff at Opera) and were no longer involved in SVG implementations. They were replaced as chair by Nikos Andronikos, but they were never properly replaced as active representatives of the Gecko and Blink SVG implementation teams. Adobe reps had also pulled back on their involvement in specs and in contributing to the open-source browsers. Apple hadn't been very active in SVG during the time I was there. At a February 2016 meeting, the Microsoft team were very openly frustrated with the delays.
I was not at the meeting in person (nobody had offered to fly me to Australia for a week), but I was participating by teleconference. It was also my first good week in months as far as energy levels go. I was feeling optimistic. When people started talking about a spring meeting, I piped up that I was going to be in the UK around the time of the April 2016 Libre Graphics Meeting outside of London. My mother had invited me for a week on a canal boat, and had reminded me of the conference. Up until that moment, I hadn't 100% decided I would go, but now it was fixed. I'd be there, and then we'd have an SVG 2 editor's meeting to tidy up the final spec issues.
By the time the April meeting arrived, the working group had lost almost all participation from the major browser representatives. There were some developers from the browser teams who were active in the issues, but most weren't the official working group reps. And they weren't editing the specs. Most of the edits were being done by Nikos (who works at Canon's research branch) and Tavmjong Bah (a stay-at-home dad and lead developer on the all-volunteer Inkscape team). And by me.
I was trying to keep my focus on the SVG Accessibility specs that I was lead editor for, but with so much work to do on SVG 2, I started agreeing to do it.
The book was completely on hold. Dudley had done some work, but I wasn't getting back to him. And it turns out that Dudley isn't any better than I am when it comes to self-motivating on major long-term projects without a lot of feedback. And I always had just one other thing left to do on SVG 2. I kept on thinking that if we just got SVG 2 finished, then the book would be much better for it. I'd actually know what was coming next for SVG, and could focus the book accordingly.
As we worked on the SVG 2 spec, however, it became clear that more work was required than we'd anticipated. The SVG spec is huge, and the SVG 2 work had been divided up between editors by chapter. It was up to each editor to raise issues with the group for their chapter. Edits were being made without review or coordination. And there were large sections of the spec that no one was worrying about because they hadn't been changed since SVG 1.1. But large sections of SVG 1.1 had never been fully implemented or properly tested.
Doug was getting pressure from W3C management to produce an SVG 2 spec. He and Nikos were trying to get the browser teams back involved, but at least one team (allegedly—I'm getting this all second-hand) told him that they wouldn't participate until the spec was published.
So Nikos and the unpaid volunteers (Tav and I) worked to patch up the most gaping holes in the leaky ship SVG, and SVG 2 was published, to minor fanfare, in September 2016.
SVG 2 is not a great spec. It might not even be a good spec. But I am at least convinced that it is a better spec than SVG 1.1. And because of the W3C's multi-level publishing structure, it could improve over time. This was only a Candidate Recommendation, a request for implementations. As feedback from implementers was received, it could be revised and re-published.
The next focus (which should have been a much earlier focus, in my opinion) was to create a proper test suite—a set of web pages that could be used to demonstrate whether software actually correctly implemented. Building that, and working on the implementations, would help identify the remaining problems with the spec.
But instead, when Doug and Nikos were finally able to get representatives from the major browsers on a teleconference, the feedback was that they really weren't sure about implementing a lot of this stuff. Could we kindly remove all the new features from the spec, so that only the fixes to old features remained?
I will write about the specific issues and problems with SVG standardization separately.
This post is personal. And personally, that was a kick in the guts. Tav reacted the same way. We'd both put in a lot of unpaid labour on this, with the only anticipated reward being the potential to actually make an impact.
Lots of changes could have been made, if issues had been raised sooner. Lots of changes had been made based on browser requests up until the browser reps stopped talking to us. I'd spent more than two weeks in June/July 2016 working on defining SVG use elements in terms of Shadow DOM, because the Blink team had half-implemented the change the year before, and I didn't want the spec to be published without it.
Now maybe we should have known better. Maybe we should have recognized no later than April 2016 that the SVG working group was in dire straits and a major intervention was required. But nobody had specifically told us that they had a problem with the spec. So it was easy to interpret the lack of involvement as a bad confluence of individual circumstances. Individual devs were too busy to contribute to the spec work, but if the spec was magically completed for them, then they'd be on board.
Meanwhile, the W3C's process meant that they needed their member companies to agree to a new charter for the SVG Working Group by January 2017, and that was looking less and less likely. Doug was leaving the W3C, and Nikos was going to be leaving because Canon didn't want to pay W3C dues any more (the dues are based on company size, and Canon is a big company with only a tangential interest in web standards). Tav wasn't going to take the lead with no support from browsers on the features he had been working so hard to spec and implement in Inkscape.
On the SVG Accessibility Task Force: one retirement, one layoff, and a variety of people with too many obligations means that nothing is happening there, either. I am still editor and chair pro tempore, but there's no point chairing meetings when there is no work being done to discuss.
After 10 months of saying that I really needed to pull back from standards work, to focus on the book and on proper paying work, I finally found myself with no one left dragging me back in.
I'm an Invited Expert to a group that no longer exists. An editor of specifications that no one wants to implement. And I'm still trying to finish up a book on Using SVG on the web, with lots of future-focused notes about upcoming new features and the likelihood (or not) that they'll ever make it to web browsers.
Administration at the W3C is still trying to revive the SVG working group, but they are doing it via quiet negotiations with browser reps. Nothing is being said on the www-svg mailing list. Members of the CSS working group have been keeping me in the loop. I've promised them that I'll write up a summary of the issues as I see them. This post was supposed to be that, but that'll have to be something separate instead.
I have mentioned to multiple people that I'd be willing to work on the spec or test suite if someone was willing to pay me to do it.
I've also been wondering about crowd-funding support from SVG developers to create a proper suite of SVG 2 polyfills. A few people have been working on bits and pieces of what's needed, but not the full package, organized in a way that's useful to end developers.
But I've also be seriously thinking about switching gears completely after the book is done (June-ish, if Dudley and I can keep going until then).
Since last summer, I've been doing some general web development freelancing. It's not grand, exciting work, but it's a nice team and it's helped ease the constant stress over money. I could focus on that kind of work for a few years, start putting some money in my savings accounts instead of taking it out.
I also still get a little wistful whenever I see cool data visualizations and interactive journalism projects. That was what I was supposed to be working on. But I'm not sure who I'd work on them for. The Canadian news industry has completely imploded in the not-quite-a-decade since I first signed up for my Master of Journalism degree. And the well-paying, dependable jobs have never been the remote-friendly, flex-schedule jobs that work for a woman with chronic fatigue.
Or there are a dozen other ideas for tools or projects of my own that I'd like to build, if only I could figure out a way to make them pay.
And not just computer dev projects. My ex keeps asking whether I've been keeping up with practicing music. (I haven't.) I've got 15 years' worth of notebooks full of song lyrics, some of which I still even remember the melodies for, and a much-delayed promise to myself that I'll teach my hands how to create the music in my head, at least well enough to put together a set of song-writer's demos. But really taking that seriously means even more time without meaningful income, and no expectation that anything would come of it beyond the ability to say that I did it.
I am torn: I have invested this much of my life into SVG. Do I build on that? Or do I write it off and start afresh with lessons learned and no regrets?
I've spent three and a half years becoming an expert, maybe the expert on SVG on the web. On all its features, and all its bugs. On the workarounds that sort of work for now, and on the proposals for better solutions, if they ever get implemented. But I never cared about SVG itself. It's just a tool. I cared about what I could build with it.
But I hate working with broken tools.
Do I keep trying to fix it, or do I throw it away?
I feel this. I only learned SVG because I wanted to make webcomics. (You've probably picked up on my specific frustrations with that.)
From a pure-technology perspective, an SVG Compat spec would be invaluable — even if browsers ignore it — as a reference to see what's treacherous. And it seems like you may be the best person to write it. And I'm not sure they'd ignore it: the HTML5 repo responded very positively when I documented some sparsely-implemented features.
From a human perspective, I can't offer advice for money, or, well, the important stuff. But, this works for me, and maybe it could work for you.
I ask myself "Did I leave this better than I found it?"
If I can answer "yes", then I usually have no regrets.
Thanks Taylor. (@tigt)
I hope I didn't give the impression that I really regret my choices. Whatever else, I have learned from them. And I know I have helped other people, and made things a little bit easier for people working with SVG to make cool things themselves.
But there are only so many hours in the day, and the days keep racing away, and so, for looking forward, it's a question of where I can make the most difference, for myself and for the community.
Anyway. Still got the book to focus on for another month or so. Then a few other much-delayed things will take over for a while. But at some point, I need to ask myself the big "what do I want to do?" questions, so I don't keep stumbling from one thing to the next with no long-term plan.
~A
Amelia, I have a similar (but not identical) story line. Half of the job of untangling it you've already done by writing it down here! Since I've been there before, I feel I must offer some help if you'd like, for thinking this through. Drop me a line if you feel like it: dotan@paracode.com
Totally worth it, to me you are an inspiration and I am already scheming how to obtain all of your books.
I think SVG is the ultimate for graphics (outside of what you can do in 3D rendering, Pixar style) and as a medium, what can be better? It has a purity and freedom that you don't get if restrict your thinking to 90's style desktop publishing apps. SVG empowers and it is the trailblazers like yourself that make the amazing Lego kit that is SVG a thing of such fascination for someone like me.
I find myself in a rarefied SVG world. Currently I am working on a SVG stylesheet that has lots of things I can USE in it. How the stylesheet picks up inherited colours and how the text within the icons is translated per locale on the fly, how it is all labelled for accessibility, well, it is all coming together. Then I find the rest of the world is still on img tag svg with some raw Adobe file contents going on inside those svg files - yikes!!!
I contend that if Leonardo da Vinci (or Jimi Hendrix) was around today then they would be using SVG as the cutting edge medium of choice.
Replace it.
Build a module that takes a graph of what you think SVG should be, and renders it to OpenGL. People can use it in the browser, or you could bundle it with enough native code to open a window and allow people to build pure-svg gui apps from node. The node-side specifically is something I personally would use the heck out of, and contribute to also. If it gets enough steam, vendors will onboard it in order to better their benchmark performance.
Thanks for sharing your story! I couldn't help but be shocked when you mentioned such a low sum for your book advance, that's barely a living wage. In the future, I would encourage you to look into self-publishing your content instead. It takes a bit more work, but you get an order of magnitude more revenue.
Nathan Barry's book Authority is a good place to start if you want to learn more.
Thank you for this post. My own tone would be far less calm in this situation.
It's incredible to me that people such as yourself doing fundamental, day-to-day work that lays the basis for the future of the web aren't being paid properly to do it. Without O'Reilly's support and that of other publishers, where would the trailblazers and creatives in our industry be? And they're a small player relative to the vast sums of money being thrown around on the web.
This is the "disruption" and "innovation" that the startup industry claims to carry out, and people like yourself are the people actually doing it.
A great read from a legend in her field. Thank you for sharing - your work has been an inspiration to me and many more, I'm sure.
I'm sorry to hear of your struggles Amelia. It's sad that SVG isn't being given the status that you and I and so many others understand it deserves. Sure I am pushing what SVG can do but it's because of people like you.
Your knowledge and dedication to the format is the life blood of SVG and I hope you don't give up on it but I would completely understand if you chose to change course.
Hey Amelia, I feel so sorry after reading your story. Here I am, a web developer who enjoy everyday all the technologies I'm allowed to use for my websites. I have been working with svg since 2-3 years now and I love it so much. But in the web we often forget that all the tools we get were written by passionate devs. Me, probably as many other devs, I wonder how I can help building the web. I don't have 8h a day for it, but surely a couple of hours per months. But I never learned at school how to contribute for specs or else. I never saw a tutorial "how to dive your hands in the web foundations and how to help building a better web". I wish I could help you (and I guess you are not the only one in such case). If you have any resource to guide me, I would really love to feel useful.
Take care of yourself, do not forget why you are doing what you are doing. Louis
Amelia (@AmeliaBR), thank you for writing this post. You've made so much effort, and been given what appears to be very little appreciation for it, against a backdrop of perpetual uncertainty. Kudos for making it this far.
I've dithered a bit with SVG these past few years, but have nowhere near your knowledge of it. Devs are very excited about CSS toys such as Grid, which arguably only came about because Bloomberg sponsored Igalia for a few years in rounding out and coding the implementation. I think SVG needs a similar intervention. You would think, fintech loves nothing better than interactive graphs and charts, but we have this whole ecosystem of SVG/Canvas/JS mashup libraries, and it all feels a bit... excessive?
Best of luck for the future, whatever you decide to do.
Hello Amelia, I found it refreshing to hear the human side of what went into writing those books and the SVG2 spec. Like Taylor Hunt, I too have been attracted to SVG with the aim to use it to create comics on the web. I have been working as a webdev for the last 3 years and have been learning about SVG (almost something new everyday). I attended the first online SVGSummit and have been following the development of the SVG2 spec with anticipation.
I was also saddened by the browsers' reactions towards the spec, but I still feel optimistic about SVG. It has taken a long time from its conception to its adoption by web developpers. It took the fall of Flash for people to pay attention to SVG. I gave a talk at a web conference earlier this month and there are still a lot of people who don't yet know the capabilities of SVG. I think that in time, people will see the value of SVG and what can be done with it. The format is an amazing tool for creating beautiful, performant visuals on the web. I believe it has a bright future.
I believe SVG to be one of the most valuable technologies on the web. I use SVG for all icons on the sites I develop. It can be used to build the beautiful bits of site interfaces that would be very difficult to create with HTML & CSS alone. Once web browsers start using GPU-enhanced rendering (like Servo), SVG will be even more important as a web technology. HTML5 canvas is cool, but with SVG, I have direct access to my vector graphics via the DOM, which means that I can use CSS animations, create interesting effects with user interaction, and interweave SVG with HTML content. This blog post was exciting to read. Thank you so much for writing this :)
This really hit incredibly close to home for me because I'm also somebody with both a tech and journalism background, and I used to live in Alberta before moving to the UK for journalism school, and I've just spent the last year working on a book about D3. As somebody who uses SVG in a newsroom setting on a near-daily basis, thank you so much for your efforts on SVG2 — I can't count the number of times I've looked for how to do something weird with text in SVG1.1, discovered a SVG2 solution, then wept upon realising vendors were nowhere near having that implemented. Your post provides some incredible insight into what the spec process is like.
Out of curiosity, do you have anything like a Gofundme or Patreon? This has been shared on both the News Nerdery and D3 Slack teams, and it's a question that's come up. If continuing to fight with SVG is indeed something you decide to do in the future, there's a very strong case for those of us who use SVG on a daily basis to help support your efforts.
Regardless of what you decide (it's a really hard decision whether or not to abandon a tool you've put a lot of effort into improving), I truly hope you're able to find some work that lets you create cool things with your considerable skillset.
@Mamboleoo
I think this is one of the biggest problems with the web standards process. It is very difficult for individual devs and small companies to contribute, without getting sucked in overboard like I did.
There have been some efforts to open it up.
The Web Platform Tests project was designed to crowd-source compatibility tests for web standards.
The Web Incubator Community Group (WICG) is trying to move early discussion of new spec proposals into more open forums, where it is easier to get involved in just the specific proposals you are interested in.
And the Chapters project, from the JavaScript Foundation (formerly JQuery Foundation) is trying to set up local groups for discussion and mentoring about web standards participation.
But it isn't easy. Managing a large community is job unto itself, one that gets even less respect than building open source software and open standards. You need someone to moderate and review all submissions. And you need good systems and structures and styleguides and planning documents in order for the work to be divisible into small pieces while still adding up to an effective whole.
What seems to happen (Web Platform Tests is an example) is that the people who have the time and expertise to do those things end up doing the work themselves, instead of trying to herd a community of cats into doing it.
My company (scripted.com) is looking to add more proven experts to our writer marketplace. Amelia, we would be more than happy to fast-track you through our writer application process, as you clearly have unique domain expertise. Our freelancers work all over the world, and tech writing is in very high demand. No promises but I might be able to convince our marketing department to become your first customer. Our blog could use content discussing the state of digital publishing technologies. noah@scripted.com
Thanks for all your hard work on the SVG 2 spec. I didn't realize it was all volunteer work. It's even more impressive that you have reached that level of expertise in just few years. I always assumed you were some former Adobe or Mozilla emplyee that was dealing with the SVG standard since its early inception.
I don't think the time you have put into it was wasted though. You are one of the top experts in SVG now and you have endless possibilities to put that knowledge into practice. SVG is not going away anytime soon and its usage has never been so widespread as it is nowadays.
It's very easy, when frustrated with overwork, to get angry and wonder, "Why isn't this done? What's taking so long? Why isn't this better? Why are there so many bugs??" This glimpse behind the scenes gives a whole new perspective on the real people working these specs—so often unpaid volunteers in over their heads doing the best with what they have. You have my gratitude.
Your work to make the web a better place might feel inconsequential at times, but you've taught and influenced so many hundreds of people—who then go on to influence even more. You've ever seen those pro pet spay/neuter graphics that show you how many puppies are born from a single unneutered couple after X number of years, each generation multiplying further? That's you at the very top, and hundreds of developer puppies spread all over the world.
Thanks so much for sharing your story, and sharing it from a personal perspective. What an enlightening read.
Amelia, thank you so much for your honesty, your work, and your expertise.
There are clearly profound, systemic problems in the way the web is currently run. This sheds some desperately-needed light on the situation.
The way you've been treated is awful. Really, deeply unfair.
Regardless of the intentions of the other people involved, this simply should not have happened. It's both cruel and counter-productive.
On a personal level, as a (former) journalist, a musician, a coder, and a person with severe Idiopathic Hypersomnia, this hits more than a little close to home.
I'm still attempting to process everything you've written, but there must be a way of preventing this in the future.
...
SVG is used daily by countless companies & developers. The cumulative amount of money produced by people who rely on SVG is, well, far more than I can estimate.
The idea that your time and expertise would be so radically undervalued while you're literally working on the spec for a crucial web technology... It's mind-boggling!
If nothing else, please know that you, your expertise, and your time are all worth much, much more than the (lack of) compensation you've been given.
I hope this is the start of a much bigger conversation, but I also hope, in one way or another, it sparks immediate and ongoing compensation for your extremely valuable skills.
@giana
I confess, that was pretty much my initial impression, too. Now that I know how difficult it can be sometimes to get anything done, I have much more awe and respect for all the web standards work that has been done -- and much more sympathy for the bugs and inconsistencies that snuck through.
@giana
Also: you know those ad campaigns are supposed to discourage you from creating hundreds of puppies, right? Clearly, they're not very effective...
@jondot @theodores2 @sophistifunk @SachaG @ceralena @selbekk @chrisgannon @Mamboleoo @tigt @sassquad @ubik @markentingh @aendrew @nkings @jarek-foksa @softpunch
Thank you, everyone, for your kind words. All the more so to those of you whom I have not interacted with before.
And it's been good to here from many people with suggestions of places to work or with offers to contribute to a crowd-funding plan. It's good to know I've got options. But I've still got this monster book to finish right now. Then, I figure out what's next!
Well at least it's not Canvas, I sometimes want to sleep for the next 10 years and wake up when we have a simple cross browser graphics API, sort of what we had when flash/ actionscript was around and the world was cool with web players, but the way it's looking who knows, maybe css will be that, anyways kudos and thanks for your involvement.
As far as the other stuff, I dunno, I think intellectual/artistic talent is not always commercially recognized and you have to go where the money is, yet trying not to loose your soul in the process. Go where you are celebrated, (and paid) not merely tolerated, the caveat is that it might not even be in software/web development.
Good Luck ! -K
@AmeliaBR Thank you for sharing this. It is unfortunate to hear that a technology so widely loved by web designers and developers has almost no backing. If you ever decide to go the crowd funding route you can count on my support!
Nice essay, Amelia.
As Amelia says, I was W3C Team Contact for the SVG WG for much of this time. Two things:
1) Amelia was one of the most effective standards engineers I ever had the pleasure to work with. She is no-nonsense, smart, creative, technical, honest, capable, pleasant (she's Canadian), hard-working, flexible, dedicated, and good to her word. She plays off that she can only work part-time, and that may be true, but she was more productive in that half-time than most other people I know working in standards. More than one person asked me privately, “Where did you find Amelia? She's amazing!” If anyone needs a standards person for CSS or SVG, and probably for many other Web topics, she would be one of my first suggestions to hire. She has other useful skills, like writing and design, and general Web development, and also has good communications skills for social media and soliciting user/developer/designer feedback, so if you're in the market for a stellar creator or developer relations person, and can offer a flexible schedule, hire her now. My only criticisms would be that she's a bit of a perfectionist, though she's not overboard about it, and that she takes on too much work, putting herself in the critical path; these are problems that would be solved by her being on a good team.
2) I've heard the criticism that SVG 2 was too ambitious, and that it shouldn't have included so many new features. To set that record straight, each of these features was something asked for by SVG designers and developers to solve real-world problems, and each of them was discussed and agreed to by the SVG Working Group, including the implementers like the browser companies and Adobe and Inkscape; but only a few people were willing to do the long-term work to make the features a reality, as Amelia alludes. It's perfectly reasonable that the implementers changed their priorities over time. But the SVG WG acted in good faith on the agreements that had been laid out originally, and those who did the work like Amelia, Tav, and Nikos were not just going off the rails. The work could have been done much faster (and tests could have been created more easily) if the browser makers in particular had stayed engaged and helped drive completion of the spec and test suite.
Thanks for sharing this story.
My research into evaluating the "SVG vs Canvas" question a few months back for a side-project for a web-comic/cartoon side-project resulted in me becoming a fan of SVG.
Seeing new books being releasing on SVG meant that there's still action and interest in community. Never knew such a story existed behind those books.
I've been also interested in SVG and worked with it already many years ago starting ~2001. Since beginning I remarked the issues with browser-compatibility but also with the standard itself. Working with it is somehow like riding a dead horse.
Reading now that even W3C and involved parties are more or less corrupting the progress by rejecting important developed parts is a very good explanation why the standard won't be really versatile useful still long time. Might be that the dead horse will be buried once in exchange by something else before even getting adult.
I know SVG is used often on Wikipedia and other sites but some features always are browser dependent and dealing with all the issues as developer might quite be painful especially if animations are integrated.
For myself the article is a clear hint to leave the hands off SVG for more complicated things and develop other solutions.
Thanks Amelia for an amazing insight into the processes that go on behind the scenes to create the web and in such accessible language. I am appalled but not surprised that you have been treated so shabbily.
So sad to see the treatment of SVG since it's inception, mainly thanks to Microsoft's intransigent decision to ignore the W3C recommendation and press on with it's half baked proprietary offering VML. Microsoft browser usage has just slipped below 10%, a shame it took so long.
Your skills will always be respected by the people who build web on a daily basis. As others have suggested it may be wise to recompense yourself using some form of crowdfunding. There are endless stupid projects raising vast sums of money, whilst your work languishes due to the slippery behaviour of web corporates who should know better.
What's stopping you from creating your own web vector language?
A Microsoft representative is listed as the chair on the April 17th charter draft. I hope that is a sign that Microsoft will finally implement missing features like SMIL path animation – and not seek to remove them from the new recommendation, or substitute half-baked polyfills.
I recently published a new SVG 1.1 authoring app (http://macsvg.org) and was prepared to add SVG 2 support if the WebKit framework extended support to it. Currently, I'm trying to figure out how to get macSVG added to the W3C SVG wiki list of authoring tool implementations, but there is no point of contact for the wiki.
No one ever said being an SVG developer would be easy. Good luck to us all.
Great writeup and thank you for all your hardwork and effort.
I've followed SVG for years now and have eagerly awaited for it to become a more mainstream graphics tool. I've seen people mention the value of it for web, but more importantly it has an amazing potential to transform how we build interactions for the future. I believe it is truly important work that we as a community (developers, designers, artists) do everything we can to drive this forward.
Whatever you decide to do in the future, know that I would gladly contribute to a crowdfunded campaign to help drive this forward.
Some developers had spent more than a decade developing fla/swf, only to see their career/experience go down the drain. A life wasted, really.
There are hackers out there (I am not one of them) who would love to see svg gets more wide-spread usage. For hackers, svg is an exploit vessel that offers endless possibilities.
Why am I mentioning flash and svg together? For hackers, they are twin brothers.
I suspect that it will be years before browser vendors, service providers, CMS's (yes WordPress) figure out how to deal with intrinsic security flaws of svg; maybe never.