SVG12: Document Conformance and RNG Schema

Dear Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group,

  http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG12/intro.html states:

[...]
  There is no official DTD for SVG 1.2, and therefore no official way to
  specify the DOCTYPE for an SVG 1.2 document. Instead, validation is
  provided by the SVG 1.2 RelaxNG schema. 
[...]

Please change to document to clearly indicate how this interacts with
the requirements for Conforming SVG Document Fragments in the SVG 1.1
specification where SVG 1.2 inherits from in some odd way. Further,
please change the document to indicate whether it is a requirement for
SVG 1.2 documents to conform to this schema. If that is required, please
change the specification so that the schema is a normative part of the
specification and that it is clear how it is determined whether a
document conforms to it (which would require e.g. a clear normative
reference to the relevant RelaxNG specification).

The RelaxNG schema uses the text/plain MIME type which is clearly not
appropriate for XML documents and this further causes conforming RelaxNG
implementations to behave in undefined ways as it only defines behavior
for text/xml and application/xml, so the type needs to be changed to one
of these types in order to allow consistent processing.

The schema further seems to depend on the SVG Tiny 1.2 schema, yet the
SVG 1.2 Working Draft does not depend on the SVG Tiny 1.2 specification,
the status of those references in the Schema is thus not clear to me,
please change the various resources and references so that this is
cleared up.

The schema also seems to depend on the XSD Recommendation yet it does
not include a normative reference to the specification, the status of
features in the schema that depend on XSD is thus not really clear to
me, please change the draft so that this is cleared up.

It is also not clear to me from the draft whether this schema can be
used to validate SVG 1.0 and SVG 1.1 documents, if SVG 1.2 is not a pure
superset of SVG 1.1 with respect to attribute and element content models
and relationships, please include a section that discusses differences
in this regard. Please include a statement whether conforming SVG 1.2
documents that do not use elements or attributes introduced in SVG 1.2
are also conforming SVG 1.1 documents (ignoring attributes that indicate
the version used by the document).

It seems that the RelaxNG schema does not fully describe all conformance
criteria for SVG 1.2 documents, please include a list of all errors that
a RelaxNG validator using the SVG 1.2 schema would not find. A detailed
discussion on why such a list and the associated review are neccessary
is available from

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2004Apr/0043.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2004Apr/thread.html#6

It also seems that the RelaxNG schema does not include an sXBL schema
even though it includes an XLink schema. It is not clear what this
means, either content from foreign namespaces is not the concern of the
SVG 1.2 schema in which case XLink should be removed from it, or it is
of concern in which case sXBL needs to be included, too. Please change
the schema in one of those ways.

It seems the SVG 1.2 conformance criteria greatly suffer from the lack
of maintenance of the SVG 1.1 Recommendation, for example, it has been
pointed out that various details regarding the grammars SVG 1.1 uses are
undefined, as an example, the lexical space of the <name> token is not
defined as reported in

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Jan/0051.html

yet SVG 1.2 continues to use the token. There appear to be many other
things wrong with the SVG 1.1 conformance criteria, for example, it is
required that "any use of CSS shall conform to Cascading Style Sheets,
level 2 CSS2 Specification" but using e.g. the "fill" property in SVG
documents will render the style sheet non-conforming to CSS 2.0 which
only allows for properties defined in CSS 2.0.

regards.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Tuesday, 7 December 2004 18:43:59 UTC