Re: SVG and MathML in text/html

Henri,

You bring up a lot of good points.

On 3/10/08, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
> On Mar 10, 2008, at 19:03, Jeff Schiller wrote:
>  > Then we'll have people creating inline SVG for HTML that won't
>  > work in the many SVG tools and viewers that are already out there
>  > and we'll just have frustrated authors.
>
>  As pointed out above, SVG in text/html won't work in existing SVG
>  tools and viewers even if the syntax inside HTML was a well-formed XML
>  island. After realizing that I won't work anyway, there's no point is
>  sticking strictly to XML tokenization.

Sorry, I mis-understood something earlier.  Can you please help me
understand why the following:

<html ...>
  <body>
  <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ...>
    <a xlink:href="foo.svg"><circle .../></a>
  </svg>
</body>
>  > </html>

wouldn't work (i.e. copy-paste the SVG section into a <?xml
version="1.0"?> doc?  To my knowledge it would work just fine (and
has).

>
>  > Then some tools might feel forced to accommodate the lax HTML-style
>  > of SVG,
>
>  Indeed. If we enable SVG in text/html, this will be the case even if
>  we insist that only XML-looking stuff is conforming.

Again, I guess I didn't understand this.  Why would conforming SVG in
text/html not work in tools?

>  >    2. I hear that some browser don't properly handle namespaced
>  > content or colons or something.  Can someone clarify which
>  > browsers?  Can someone further clarify what exactly the problems
>  > are?  Can someone confirm if that browser will have fixed itself,
>  > say, next year would we be good to go?
>
>  IE does its own thing in text/html with the colon. OTOH, other
>  browsers don't do anything in particular with the colon in text/html
>  and existing content expects that they don't. We cannot specify a
>  colon-based mechanism that would cause spectacular breakage with
>  existing content that expects browsers other than IE not to do
>  anything special on the colon.

This is the case that I would like to understand.  What type of
text/html content uses a colon and doesn't expect "anything special"?
And what does "special" mean in this case?  What kind of colon-ized
content is out there that we can't break in Firefox, Opera, Safari?

>  I have a problem with namespace URIs every single time I need to deal
>  with XHTML, SVG, etc. I always have to waste time looking up and URI
>  to copy and paste because trying to go by memory and getting it wrong
>  (which year? trailing slash?) would waste even more time.

My primary concern is that we have an existing XML language that is
relatively widely deployed - a variety of tools out there, a variety
of viewers out there.  Changing the language means that some tools
will support the changes and others may not.  This will lead to
frustrated authors and frustrated developers.

Regards,
Jeff

Received on Monday, 10 March 2008 21:14:16 UTC