This is more of an inkscape-devel discussion. But I'll add some
thoughts here.

When SVG 1.1 was years and years old and no one except maybe Opera was
doing anything with it at all, the Inkscape project added features,
some from SVG 1.2 (flowing text etc), some from hacks (like the
gradient stops) and some we just made whole cloth from our own xml
namespace.

The problem comes when the SVG 2.0 specification really got going. We
were left holding features which we'd probably have to keep being able
to open, but other browsers and editors wouldn't ever be able to.

That's the core of the problem with doing things yourself.

What we lack here is a huge amount of developer time. We could do with
having a whole brigade of selfless expert developers who follow
instructions and produce amazing work. We'd also like it for free. This
really is not realistic. We have instead is a small but amazing team of
fairly even handed developers who follow their own passion projects and
do it for sometimes free and sometimes outside contracts in a complex
real world sort of way.

Making the call to add a feature is actually the fairly easy part. I
have a plan for multi-page support using groups and a couple of
inkscape attributes, but I don't have the developers to put it
together. It's the kind of thing where a whip round in a hat would
bring in a pile of gold enough to hire someone to do the work, but even
doing the collection is work and that's a catch-22.

What we need is more inkscape-users who can really get involved in the
project. Not development tasks (unless you want to ;-)) but some of
these other tasks. Community projects that involve communication, news,
asking for money, doing bug management. There's a lot out there, but a
small chunk each and we'd have a more robust structure to build the
next inkscape from.

So come join inkscape, your svg editor needs you.

Best Regards, Martin Owens

P.S. For animation, everyone should be paying attention to AniGen.org
that's a single developer doing a strong job of putting an animation
editor together.

On Fri, 2017-04-21 at 16:06 +0200, Donn Ingle wrote:
> Seems SVG is more and more invisible to the big companies. Here's sad
> tale of Amelia Bellamy-Royds's experiences with SVG and its seeming
> demise.
> (http://codepen.io/AmeliaBR/post/me-and-svg)
>
> I wonder how the Inkscape devs (et al.) feel about this. Could
> Inkscape not take a new route, perhaps bake-in some new features*,
> now that the SVG standards seem to be moot?
>
> * 
> Multiple pages in one file ­— and export to multi-page PDFs.
> A real symbol system — within and between documents. 
> Custom colours that don't rely on that fake gradient trick (And make
> them work between documents too!)
> Animation time lines.
> Output to gif, video and so forth. Perhaps to HTML5 Canvas with some
> js framework too. 
> Scripting, Blender-style, right there in the app. In Python and JS
> perhaps.
> Opening of Gimp native files (xcf) into layers, perhaps.
> Use of 3D objects and materials, from Blender (say) directly in the
> canvas — some kind of OLE layer thing.
>
> I am sure there are many more.
>
> I think Inkscape could have, by now, matched what Flash, Freehand and
> Corel et al. had 20 years ago! It did not go there because it,
> honourably, stuck to the SVG standards.
>
> Inkscape is the best thing we have for graphic design on Linux (at
> least), but it's still way too primitive. Could we dare to think
> bigger? Start our own standard?
>
> Just wondering. Is this a disaster or an opportunity?
>
> /d
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