Hi Erik,
>From the draft charter of the CSS-SVG Effects Task Force:
http://www.w3.org/2010/fx/effects-task-force.html
> The task force provides a forum for identification and discussion of
> shared features, and joint development and publication of specifications
> (with syntax for both CSS and SVG), including, but not limited to:
>
> * Advanced text layout (along with XSL-FO WG?)
> o Wrapping text to a shape (optical kerning)
> o Sizing shapes to fit text
> o Vertical text
I think coordination is truly important for the other items in your list
(transforms, filters, animation) but I think there's a problem of
priorities here. The text-related items above seem to be much, much
lower priority compared to things like a better grid model and basic
layout features like hyphenation controls.
Maybe a simple API for measuring text (e.g. length and bounding box?)
would be sufficient enough to allow these types of effects without
requiring effort put into features whose user benefit to implementation
complexity ratio is extremely low.
Also, it's my understanding that optical kerning refers to adjusting the
layout of text based on the shape of individual glyphs and not to
fitting text to shapes of arbitrary complexity.
Regards,
John Daggett
Mozilla Japan