Re: SVG animations without SMIL

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 6:46 AM, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de> wrote:
> Tab Atkins Jr. :
> ...
>>There is no distinction between "content" and "style" animations.
>>They are identical.  SMIL has a few facilities that CSS animations
>>don't, and vice versa, but that's not due to "content" vs "style".
>>There is no meaningful semantic difference between the two categories;
>>machines treat them the same.  (Semantics being the way we communicate
>>our intent to machines, so they can use the page better; we
>>communicate our meaning to humans with style and presentation.)
> ...
>
> Obviously you missed the point, why CSS was invented at all,

I'm a core member of the CSSWG, so no, I understand what CSS is for.
SVG, however, doesn't contain very much "content" in the sense we
usually give that word in standards (as it's used for the HTML/CSS
content/style separation concept).  "Content" is information that is
useful in a presentation-agnostic fashion, that is usefully
extractable by machines and can be operated on for the user's benefit
in multiple interaction modalities.  At the moment, the only things
that fits that bill are the elements that hold text - <text>, <desc>,
etc.

Some proposed additions to SVG *do* add more content, like the
Connectors proposal, which gives useful information to machines about
how elements are connected. This can, for example, direct the tabbing
order, and help with reading out relationships.  (There is some
interesting stuff about touch-based presentation of visual content, so
sight-impaired can still read bar graphs/etc, but that's mostly a hack
around our current lack of useful semantic information.)

Most of SVG, tho, is style. It's just written with angle brackets and
equals signs rather than curly braces and colons.  There's nothing
wrong with that - it's mostly an image description format, style is
what it's *for* - but there's a legacy idea that SVG is for documents
as much as HTML is, and that has simply never been true.

>>If you can't in practice use something because it won't be available
>>to ~1/3 of your users, and there's no realistic path to making that fraction
>>much smaller, it's something to deprecate and discourage, not continue
>>pretending it's a useful standard.
>
> According to this, CSS styling of SVG should be deprected and discouraged.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 8 June 2015 18:29:45 UTC