Re: SVG in text/html

Dana Lee Ling wrote:
> Maciej and Andrew both assert the above. I am only an end user, so I 
> suppose I am misunderstanding the issue, but I have found that Amaya 10 
> renders SVG in text/html. Is Amaya 10 not an implementation?

To be honest, Amaya is not a usable web browser implementation.  Not does it 
claim to be.  See <http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/FAQ.html#L125>.

For example, I just tried loading <http://www.cnn.com/> in Amaya 10.  It crashed.

Then I tried loading <http://news.bbc.co.uk/>.  I got an alert box about errors 
in the source code and a screen full of red.  I had to page down a few times to 
see the actual content.

But even more importantly for this discussion, loading the following HTML 
document in Amaya:

   <b>This <i>is</b> a test</i>

shows a bold non-italic "This", a bold italic "is", and a non-bold, non-italic 
"a test".  All other UAs (or at least all graphical UAs that hope to have 
anything like a user base) show "a test" as non-bold italics.  Regressing this 
test would be a stop-ship bug for Gecko, because a very large number of web 
pages depend on this sort of behavior.

Based on that test, Amaya's HTML parser just doesn't handle HTML the way other 
UAs out there do and the way web sites expect.  If you're willing to accept that 
from your parser, it becomes easier in a lot of ways to handle inline SVG, since 
the main issues with inline SVG handling are how to do so without breaking 
existing pages.  If you're breaking lots of existing pages anyway (as in Amaya's 
case), hypothetically breaking a few more is just not an issue.

-Boris

P.S.  I'm ignoring the other little things that prevent anyone actually using 
Amaya for browsing, like the lack of SSL support and JavaScript support.  As 
their FAQ points out, for an editor these are not necessarily required.

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 06:03:30 UTC