Good developments on all fronts these days. donscarletti is busy adding filters to librsvg. Coming from my ‘icons’ angle I am a bit worried about performance though. To be supporting more SVG features is only a boon if they doesn’t detract from the excelent performance of librsvg. Personally I think that long term we probably want two SVG rendering engines. One ‘limited’ but fast for icon and other GUI graphics rendering. And one full featured, but naturally slower for web stuff etc. So when the time comes and we want a full featured SVG engine with support for everything I think GNOME should use KSVG or xsvg instead, at least if they are possible to integrate with Mozilla. The final solution could of course be that we use KSVG for the instances where we want the full featured stuff, like the web and replace librsvg with xsvg as the fast ‘icon’ renderer. Time will tell, when you live in a world of darwinistic software developments the landscape tends to change under you when you do long term planning :)

KSVG seems to be heading in a good direction though and it could turn out to be a good example of how things should be done in the future with a mix of both ‘KDE’ and ‘GNOME’ technology since it will be using both libxml and libcroco.

Things are also looking good on the GStreamer front. Over the last week many of the bigger bugs has been squashed and dolphy managed to get seeking back online which was the last major regression in my view compared to the 0.6 branch. There are still some major bugs that needs ironed out, especially in regards to video playback, but I feel very upbeat about the current situation. thomasvs has been doing lots of really great work on improving underlaying technology of the new website so hopefully we can switch our domains over to the new location soon. I am also pleased to see wingo looking at
how we support pro-audio needs and where we need to improve. And there are also lots of patches rolling in from all over, from both new and old contributors.

I have also started pondering pushing for GNOME to move to using SVG icons for GNOME 2.8 as the default. Glad to find that Jimmac feels the same way, although we do differ in how to approach it. Or actually I guess I could fall down on the same approach as Jimmac if I feel it is really feasible to have completed in time for 2.8.

My hope is that GNOME 2.8 could be a 100% SVG version which is why I am really happy to see the work being done to convert all the GNOME games to use SVG. This conversion has of course uncovered some more bugs, which once again reminded me that there is a huge gap between saying you support something to actually doing so. GNOME basically got SVG support with GNOME 1.4, but it has taken many iterations to make it as good as it is today, and I don’t mean just in terms of rendering quality, but all the little issues and bugs that needs to be fixed for the desktop to treat SVG images in an intelligent way instead treating them as bitmaps. Even if the libs in theory supports them, there are always many assumptions made by application developers which simply doesn’t hold true when you throw scalable vector graphics into the ring.