neutering switch (was Minutes, 21 July 2016 SVG WG telcon)

Hi Nikos and Doug

>From Wednesday, August 17, 2016 3:17 AM  
 nikos: Does anyone else have any input on neutering switch?

   shepazu: I have mixed feeling about switch. I wonder how much
   it is used and I worry about browsers spending too much effort
   on switch that isn't going to be implemented and used
   ... if you think about its origins, what was it used for ? It
   came from SMIL. SMIL was a very specific community of authors
   and processors and I don't think that's what people are doing
   today with web content for the most part
   ... so we inherited it from style, I wonder if we should do the
   minimal thing to not break it in SVG 2
   ... if we want to do declarative conditional processing outside
   of CSS we should reexamine the use cases and see what we're
   trying to accomplish
   ... this comes up in accessibility. If someone makes a document
   that has switch for languages, whats the accessible name?
   ... makes sense for title, but very few go to the effort

I'm not sure if this is a valid use case or not, but, since so much of the
web is now phone-based, and things like 

https://ello.co/ddailey/post/p68grxig2tne7wpu8k1jjq

or

https://ello.co/ddailey/post/hwqd8hmolnwx7-vp4zocfq


don't work so well on phones yet (requiring more horsepower and maybe a
GPU),  having a declarative way to switch content, so that something could
be SVG for a grown-up machine and animated GIF (which most of the world of
animated graphics uses anyhow) for the purposes previously reserved for SVG
Tiny, could be quite valuable. Doing this declaratively is of interest since
SVG will ultimately reach far more people through <img> tags than through
CodePen -- just sayin'. Of course my sense is that whenever things are moved
away from SVG, they have a tendency to break for a few years and sometimes
never get fixed.

regards
David

Received on Wednesday, 17 August 2016 16:09:52 UTC