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

"Thomas E Deweese" <thomas.deweese@kodak.com>

(for some reason this ended up in my spam bucket, so I commented in a
reply to Tobias what is probably more relevant being here.)

> >>>>> "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).

As I suggest in my reply to Tobias, I don't agree that that's been
successful, as span is allowed to be a child of a in html so we now have
confusion, also the suggestion that tspan=span implies text=div, but div
isn't block, it's a flow element.

>     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.

I agree that does make things more complicated, however a prose
restriction on this (text as a child of text not allowed to have a
transform attribute) would be less of an imposition than the current
state of affairs, where we cannot style parts of the text in an SVG link.

>     This is normally done using an altGlyph tag that references an SVG
> font that has your circle.

That seems silly, we have the semantics in SVG for describing a circle,
it's the circle element, to be forced to create it as a font is a little
odd, why not just do everything with fonts?

> 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.

http://jibbering.com/2002/8/text-mixup.svg

Jim.

Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 09:54:11 UTC