Re: SVG and proper XML design

Doug Schepers wrote:

> 
> That ship is halfway across the ocean, but I'm curious what other syntax 

Being a political decision doesn't necessarily mean it is wrong,
of course; it simply means that there is a strong incentive not
to look at alternatives.

> you think would be better, and why?  To me, the ability to structure the 
> document, and to have individual elements exposed to the animation and 
> scripting, and to take advantage of the entire DOM infrastructure are 
> more compelling than allowing mixed-namespace content.

Most of these only require that it should be a serialization of a tree
structure.  If, as I did, you assume that human reading and editing are 
not important factors, a binary tagged tag-length-value format, like 
ASN.1 Basic Encoding Rules (which I think XML is now competing against 
generally)might be an obvious candidate.  Even if one has a text format, 
there is no need for the tag name in closing tags, so simple function
notation, with parentheses would work (the closing tag names are 
probably one of the main causes of the HTML tag soup problem, even 
though they help a human reader when used properly).
> 
> Firefox and Opera do support inline SVG, and ASV as well to a lesser 

In that case
<http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox_1.5#SVG_usage_situations>
needs fixing:

   Firefox 1.5 and 2 handle SVG as entire documents or when referenced
   by embed, object, or iframe. Firefox cannot currently use an SVG
   document as the source for an HTML or XHTML img element or for CSS
   properties that take an image reference.

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2007 21:32:37 UTC