Re: SVG in text/html

Hi, David-

Please don't derail what is a very productive, practical discussion with 
ideological rants about the nature, purpose, and quality of XML.  All 
this can accomplish is starting a flame war that none of us have time for.

The case of SVG in XHTML is very clear and obvious, and the details are 
being worked out in the CDF WG.  Because they are both XML, they blend 
together neatly.

What we are talking about here is something very different --the 
blending of 2 different species of markup-- and therefore has different 
constraints.  SVG in plain old HTML has many pragmatic use cases, and we 
are trying to work out what challenges it will face and how to solve 
them in a way that it Just Works for authors.

As regards cross-posting, I think it needs to be done to make sure that 
all interested parties can coordinate on the issue.  The CDF, SVG, HTML 
WGs all have a stake in this.  I think a lack of such cooperation and 
collaboration has gotten us into a lot of trouble that could have been 
solved by establishing clear channels of communication early on.

Finally, Sam was not attacking XML, as you insinuate.  He was presenting 
facts about challenges SVG-in-HTML faces.

XML is OK.  HTML is OK.  They should kiss and make up.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Staff Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

David Woolley wrote (on 10/14/2007 5:21 AM):
> 
> Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
>>
>> 1) People often author content which is inserted into a larger 
>> context.  Blogs, wikis, comments, are but a few examples.  Requiring 
>> the entire page to be xml well formed, and requiring that none of the 
>> page be displayed if there is any well formedness errors, is a 
>> non-starter for 
> 
> What you are basically saying is that the whole XML concept is flawed. 
> As I understand it, the reason for requiring well-formedness is not, as 
> some people seem to think, so that you can detect and throw out 
> documents with very poor syntax, but so that you can mix languages and 
> safely embed content, i.e. it is to support the X in XML.  A 
> well-formedness violation basically means that you no longer know which 
> language (namespace) you are in, and that's why parsers are expected to 
> abort.
> 
> I think the HTML5 approach would end up being to add yet more error 
> recovery rules, to cover SVG in HTML cases, MathML, in SVG in HTML 
> cases, etc.
> 
>> most sites.  I'd love to see the day when svg could be copy/pasted 
>> into MySpace and MathML copy/pasted into Facebook, and have it "just 
>> work".
> 
> That was the key design aim of XML!
> 
> Incidentally, as noted in one of my replies to a recent thread on 
> www-html, it is not a good idea for blog engines, etc., to simply copy 
> third party content into the matrix.  They should be restricting it to 
> content that is "well formed" in all intended languages, as part of 
> making safe.  If it isn't well formed, some browsers may not correctly 
> detect the end of the embedded content, or may be tricked into 
> recognising early, thus frustrating the sort of "untrusted" marking that 
> was being proposed in that thread, and requiring that any trust marking 
> be orthogonal to the DOM structure.
>>
>> 2) There are is well-known and widely deployed browser which will not 
>> display content served as application/xhtml+xml at all.
> 
> Those browsers support embedded VML, not embedded SVG (and actually do 
> so using full XML namespace syntax, even though that is not supposed to 
> be used in documents served as text/html!
> 
> Note, in general, I think cross-posting between mailing lists is a bad 
> idea, as replies are likely to get rejected or moderated on most of 
> them, but I've made an exception in this case and even added www-html, 
> which seems to me to a more appropriate to discuss whether the XML 
> concept was a mistake.  Please note that I am only subscribed to www-svg 
> and www-html, amongst the lists used.
> 

--

Received on Sunday, 14 October 2007 10:13:39 UTC