Re: SVG12: discard begin

* Robin Berjon wrote:
>Your logic is flawed. You either assume the user is in front of the  
>animation throughout, or anything goes since we have no data to back  
>anything up. For all we know, 99% of users watch animations seven  
>times in a row — you're pulling out a probability function out of  
>thin air.

The <discard> element removes an element from the document tree when the
discard element begins. Per the current draft, the discard element would
begin as soon as possible by default. The default applies if the begin
attribute is not specified, or specified but set to an unsupported value
like begin="02:00" (the element begins after 2 minutes; SVG Tiny 1.2
does not support this syntax, but SVG "Full" 1.2 will, for all we know).

I argued that authors would not expect this behavior as, if they would
want to have the element discarded as soon as possible, the user is not
going to see much, if anything, of the discarded element, and it would
be wiser to not include the element to be discarded in the first place,
and, considering the feature is meant for long running animations, that
authors are likely to specify the begin time in something but seconds as
will be allowed in SVG "Full" 1.2, which would cause the element to be
discarded too early. Users are more likely to watch the beginning of the
animation, and increasingly less likely to watch later parts of it. The
current default would cause the content to appear broken for more users.

You argued, against the last point, that authors who care would simply
use times specified in seconds to avoid this problem. I think that SVG
Tiny 1.2 should be designed so content is available to more users, even
if authors do not care that much about compatibility. Against the former
point the Working Group argued it is more important that user agents can
discard elements as much as possible to save memory, and that this is
more important than language design easily understandable by authors. As
I disagree that authors want the elements discarded before users can see
the content, the current default is likely to have the opposite effect
of what the Working Group intends, authors are less likely to notice
that they have included superfluous content and corresponding discard
elements in their documents.

In conclusion, my logic does not appear to be flawed at all, and so I
continue to object to the Working Group's response.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Saturday, 22 July 2006 21:52:52 UTC