Re: SVG and MathML in text/html

On 3/11/08, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:
>
>  Hi, Henri-
>
>  Henri Sivonen wrote (on 3/10/08 4:51 PM):
>  >
>  > XHTML totally failed to use the well-known strategy of leveraging the
>  > existing network effects by being compatible with the installed base of
>  > the previous technology generation.
>
>
> I strongly agree with you here.  I think that that was a serious failing
>  of the deployment of XHTML.
>
>  I also want to emphasize, however, that the same situation obtains in
>  reverse here.  SVG already has a wide deployment base on mobiles, and in
>  legacy viewers, that demands strict content (with the odd exception in
>  the case of namespace declaration in Adobe's viewer).  The network
>  effect would be critically lessened if an incompatible serialization of
>  SVG were deployed, as I said before.
>

In fairness, unlike XHTML, Henri's suggestion allows the existing
deployed SVG content (i.e. conforming XML) to be used directly in
HTML5, it just doesn't condem the content if it's non-conforming XML.
My only fear is that this will eventually allow tutorials out there to
drop some of the XML aspects and end up with non-conforming SVG
fragments that cannot be read into tools as standalone documents.

If all SVG viewers and editors could be magically updated to support a
text/html serialization of SVG then I'd be less concerned.

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 15:44:51 UTC