Re: SVG in HTML proposal

On 7/15/08, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:
>
>
>  2) If my SVG has a foreignObject with HTML in it, and the browser does not
>> handle SVG yet, then the contents of that foreignObject will be
>> inadvertently rendered by the UA, which might not be desired.  Any
>> recommendation for that?   html: prefix for all elements?
>>
>
> This is one reason that I initially suggested the <ext> element [1], so
> that any UA which does not understand SVG but does support <ext>/<fallback>
> (which would be trivial to implement) could not only hide any such
> extraneous code, but also render a fallback (and it would work for any
> non-HTML language, not just SVG, so you could have a fallback for MathML,
> etc.).  We'll have to see if there is support for that particular bit.


But IE7- understands neither SVG nor <ext>.  I assume it it doesn't
understand CSS Namespaces either (in which case we can't use Erik's
suggestion).  There are hacks to add unknown elements in IE though [1], so
with script and IE-specific stylesheets you could work around - for users
who have enabled scripting.


On 7/15/08, Erik Dahlström <ed@opera.com> wrote:

> Having <svg:a> be interpreted by a legacy user agent as <html:a> is perhaps
> not that critical, you can even add a 'src' attribute to have the link work
> in both contexts, so it can be used as a sort of fallback.


I assume you mean a 'href' attribute to the link ;)  I use this very hack on
my blog comments, actually [2].  However, in my case it was intentional and
I was very cognizant of it.  I can't say the same for other authors who want
to just copy and paste SVG fragments into HTML documents and see it work.

Another semi-problem is that text nodes within SVG fragments will be
rendered by IE.  This is a problem with any solution of SVG-in-HTML, not
just the SVG WG proposal and I guess in that case we need to use the
document.createElement() hack to avoid it?

I guess the reality is that for the one non-SVG browser vendor out there
we're always going to have problems with any SVG-in-HTML solution and it
will just come down to arming web authors with the knowledge to work around
that browser's lack of support until such day that...

Hopefully,
Jeff

[1]
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2008/01/22/Best-Standards-Support#c1201006277
[2]
http://blog.codedread.com/archives/2008/04/16/svg-news-digest-2008-04-16/#comment-12520