[fullstackchris]

Facts like these always drives me crazy... these companies (namely Microsoft, but I guess Google/Mozilla as well a bit) have huge teams and resources, and can't build a browser that follows specs that have been hammered out only after years of work.

[kbenson]

There's a reason why some bodies ship a reference implementation with the standard. Sometimes what's specified is infeasible, or even impossible (if the spec contradicts itself) to implement.

[amelius]

But what if the other vendors do have an implementation?

[kbenson]

This is in the context of an upstream comment (softly) claiming that now browser has 100% SVG support.

I think sometimes this is because the full spec is infeasible to implement, at least in a performant manner, and rather than implement a fully compliant but slow mess, they implement a partially compliant but usefully fast subset.

Providing a reference implementation allows a standards body to learn early that what they are speccing is counterproductive in one manner or another, prior to releasing it and getting vendor feedback.

[amelius]

Ok, but it's not like Microsoft can't discuss with W3C any problems (in their view) in the standard.

Anyway, I totally agree that there should be a reference implementation. Imho, preferably in a purely functional language, to keep it as clean as possible.

[kbenson]

> Ok, but it's not like Microsoft can't discuss with W3C any problems (in their view) in the standard.

Oh, I'm not defending Microsoft specifically, they're generally pretty horrible on this front. All the browser vendors have components in various states of compliance though, and some components seem to sit at a certain level for years.

[Rondom]

Opera (Presto) supported 100% of the SVG standard, if I remember correctly.