Re: Another draft of SVG book: Draft 2.0

Hi everyone,


> I've uploaded the newest draft of the book to the W3C server (changing its
> name to reflect the new title):
>  http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html

Yes, I noticed this, and my previous message was suggesting stuff
already against this version (unfortunately, I didn't made it clear).


> I spent a considerable amount of time (a few hours) cleaning up the HTML
> code to make it well-formed and valid (which is why it took me so long to
> upload it).  I really hope we can avoid that in the future.  I know you
> originally wrote the book in a text editor (MS Word?), but hopefully someone
> out there can recommend an HTML-output editor that won't butcher the code.
>  Any suggestions?

Notepad++? :-D  (Well, although this may sound a bit geeky, actually
I'm not aware of an HTML editor which doesn't try to "optimize" the
markup or -- worse -- simply bloat it.)


> I think we can avoid most of those problems by coming up with a cleaner way
> to handle the content that is now in tables.  Most of that is not actually
> tabular data, but is being used for layout and positioning. The annotations
> in particular could be handled by CSS much more nicely.

Yes, I agree that most code+image could/should be placed in "div"
elements... These could even be floated in order for the text to
surround them causing a neat visual effect. :-)


> I would also like to see SVG rather than rasters wherever possible.

I'm not sure about that. I've already stated this would be a bad idea:
 * The number of animated SVG examples and high processing
requirements of some of them would render the document unusable;
 * Most animations (ones without looping) would already have been
finished by the time the reader looked at them;
 * Placing as many SVG content within a single document will likely
crash some implementations: for example, ASV6 crashes with just a few
objects (and, although moribund, I guess we should support it until
something better comes up for IE users).

I've also already proposed something like a click/activate event which
would replace the raster version with an object/embed tag with the
same dimension. I'm convinced this would be less prone to the problems
above, but I need to make a few tests for sure. :-)


> Regards-
> -Doug Schepers
> W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Regards,
 Helder