RE: Dropping angle-bracket syntax for animation

 David Dailey:
>What is the clear distinction
>between appearance and semantics when it comes to rectangles? Is it
>Geometry? Should we rename SVG as Scalable Vector Geometry and move color,
>motion, pattern, gradient, APIs, interaction, and semantics to other
>specialty realms? What a wonderful way to create decades of conflict and
>strife! 

I think, the author has the choice. If (presentation) attributes are used,
it is related to semantics or is required to unterstand the meaning/intention
of the document (of course, there can be alternatives expressed with 
alternative style sheets as well, realising another approach to understand
the document). If CSS notation is used, this means, the
given properties are not relevant for the understanding of the document.
In doubt only can savely remove them all without losing any information ;o)
Therefore it is the decision of the author what matters (XML syntax) and
what is only decorative (CSS and java-script alternatives).

This is quite different to text in XHTML compared to graphics with SVG.
For graphics it is not so obvious, what matters as content, therefore it
is always the decision of the author. 
If tools like for example inkscape do it wrong, of course, authors always
need to clean up such bugs to get meaningful documents.
If the language itself does not provide syntax to mark up a functionality
(no declarative animation of content in XHTML for example), an extension
like SMIL (timesheets) are required or another language has to be used
to cover the use case.

Olaf

Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2011 16:56:45 UTC