Re: SVG in HTML5 draft proposal

[ potential cross posting problems on public-html ]

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> (Replying to a message from public-svg-wg:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-svg-wg/2008AprJun/att-0142/SVG-in-HTML-proposal.html 

>> looser syntax, like tags not been closed, etc.

Both tags and elements have to be closed in HTML, so I presume this 
actually meant that many closing and some opening tags can be inferred 
by the parser (systematically for valid HTML and by heuristics, or HTML 
5 type, "no input is invalid". rules, for real world HTML).

> More to the point, XML defines unambiguous parsing in that case, but 
> doesn't specify interaction further than that.
>> When embedding HTML inside SVG, the HTML markup must be well formed.
>>
> I think requiring HTML to be well-formed inside or outside SVG in 
> text/html is a bad requirement, since it would defeat a part of the 
> value proposition that motivates SVG in text/html in the first place: 

I would say that anyone creating new HTML in SVG in HTML should 
understand SVG well enough that they should not have difficulty writing 
the nested HTML without unpaired tags, or for that matter, writing the 
whole document in XHTML.  As regards the common practice of cut and 
paste coding everything, inside the outermost SVG element is, almost 
certainly, going to be copied from someone who did create from new, and 
it doesn't matter that the matrix HTML is tag soup.

Embedding SVG in HTML, for use by a browser that primarily supports 
HTML, doesn't fundamentally require that the matrix HTML have balanced 
tags, or even be valid.  Where it matters in that context is if you wish 
to process the SVG part of the file with tools that don't understand 
HTML.  However, the idea of having two different serializations of SVG 
is also in conflict with such tools.



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David Woolley
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Received on Friday, 27 June 2008 07:19:02 UTC