Re: Declarative Randomization (RE: Revisiting SVG Fonts)

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Cyril Concolato <
Cyril.Concolato@cisra.canon.com.au> wrote:

> During the F2F prior to TPAC, the SVG WG discussed your proposed
> requirement to have declarative randomization support in SVG 2 (see
> http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/SVG2_Requirements_Mailing_List_Feedback#Randomization).
> We decided not to include this requirement mainly because we thought that
> this can already be done in script today and we did not see the reason to
> make it native in the browser.
>

Some kind of declarative randomness would be useful for SVG images, because
browsers do not enable scripting in SVG images and are unlikely to do so
for security reasons. The same is likely to be true for any kind of SVG
fonts.

Any such feature would be difficult to specify though. In some use-cases
you want values that vary within a document but are the same every time you
load the document. In other use-cases you want values that vary every time
you load the document --- but you'd like to be able to test with particular
values. You also need to figure out how random values are affected by DOM
changes --- there's a general Web principle that the rendering of a DOM is
independent of the history of DOM operations that were used to construct
the DOM, and we probably wouldn't want to break that for this feature.

Rob
-- 
"If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not
in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us
our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not
sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us." [1 John
1:8-10]