Hi,
Jasper and I were able to represent Inkscape at SVG Open 2011 in Boston thanks to financial aid from the conference organizers. I gave two talks, one on Inkscape's currents status and another on the state of Mesh gradients in the SVG working group. Jasper gave a talk on separating gradients from geometry. Papers/slides for the talks can be found at the SVG Open website (www.svgopen.org/2011). We also were able to attend an SVG working group meeting after the conference where we discussed mostly mesh gradients and connectors.
There were many interesting talks despite attendance being a bit lower than last year (maybe due to the very high cost of hotel rooms in Boston?). A few notes from the conference:
1. Microsoft is finished with their SVG 1.1 implementation. They will not support SVG Fonts nor SMILE animation. SVG Fonts will also not be supported by Firefox (old news).
There is a move to get SVG fonts packaged inside OpenType. This would satisfy the need to support complex writing systems like Hindi. There is broad interest in this solution as it would allow, for example, multi-color fonts. SVG 2.0 will also likely include an API to get glyph outlines so the shapes can be manipulated.
Microsoft is interested in animation but wants to see SVG and CSS unite on a common animation framework. Currently CSS3 Animations lack the power of SVG SMILE (which is only a subset of the complete SMILE standard). Unfortunately, JavaScript cannot always be used due to security restrictions.
2. JavaScript has gotten wickedly fast. This was demonstrated multiple times, most dramatically by the D3 JavaScript data visualization library. The examples shown in the D3 talk were very impressive. See: http://mbostock.github.com/d3/
Tav