Re: SVG12: shorthand presentation attributes

* Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
>> e.g. by adding that shorthand properties are con-
>> ceptually inserted after their longhands into the author style sheet.
>
>I'm not sure that's a distinction that can be uniformly drawn, actually.... 
>certainly not within CSS.

Indeed, but SVG 1.2 as currently proposed has only two shorthand
properties ('font' and 'marker') for which this would work.

>Also consider that some things which are currently longhands in CSS2/2.1 are 
>effectively shorthands in CSS3 (they expand to a set of finer-grained properties).

Yes, that would cause problems even for SVG 1.2 as currently proposed,
the 'font' shorthand in css3-fonts resets the font-stretch property
which it did not in CSS2 (as it is not available in CSS2) which is
currently referred to, so the result for

  <text font="..." font-stretch="..." ...>...</text>

would at some point be unclear; at the moment I would expect that the
conceptual author style sheet would be either

  font: ...;
  font-stretch: ...;

or

  font-stretch: ...;
  font: ...;

which would yield in the same result; but if SVG refers to CSS3 in a
future version this might yield in different results...

If you try to manage both the CSS3 properties and the SVG properties
in the same style manager you'd have a couple of more problems like
different value spaces for properties like 'color' which allows rgba()
syntax in CSS3 but not in SVG. But the SVG Working Group claims that

  We have feedback from a number of implementers who have not
  found implementing SVG and CSS in the same cascade a problem.

... but that's a different debate really, I was only concerned about
the presentation attributes in SVG 1.2.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Thursday, 31 March 2005 04:43:53 UTC