Re: [SVG1.0] no tspan allowed inside an anchor?

>>>>> "JL" == Jim Ley <jim@jibbering.com> writes:

JL> What I've never fully understood is the motivation for tspan
JL> anyway, this wouldn't be an issue if tspan didn't exist (and
JL> instead text could be a child of text.)  The difference in allowed
JL> attributes is minimal, and I can't see anything obvious which
JL> would prevent this.

JL> So what is the motivation for the existence of tspan?

    I think there were two things.  First off we were trying to at
least parallel other W3C standards so we used tspan to parallel
XHTML's span element (note that tspan is an 'inline' element not a
'block' element like text).

    Second tpsan has no transform attribute (this may change in the
future), but transform on an 'inline' piece of text is actually pretty
tricky since often it doesn't have an explicit absolute X/Y - so
constructing complex transforms is almost impossible.

>> <text ...> <a ...> <circle .. ></a> </text> <!-- DTD valid -->

JL> It might be very useful to have that mark-up though, so you can
JL> position a circle relative to some text, something which I can't
JL> seem to manage at the moment - expect an issue in this area once
JL> I've fleshed it out into something postable...

    This is normally done using an altGlyph tag that references an SVG
font that has your circle.  This isn't as straight forward as it might
be (especially considering the Y axis inversion needed for glyphs) and
there is already talk about more ways to mix text and graphics in
dynamic layouts within the SVG WG.

    However, for now this generally works and is the simplest way to
mix text and graphics in one 'flow'.

Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 08:34:09 UTC