SVG <title> (was: SVG Feedback on HTML5 SVG Proposal)

Hi, Ian-

Ian Hickson wrote (on 3/10/09 7:48 PM):
> On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Doug Schepers wrote:
>>
>>  * The SVG WG is of the opinion that the contents of the SVG 'title'
>>  element should be RCDATA, and therefore would prefer that the HTML5
>>  parsing algorithm not require conforming parsers to break out of foreign
>>  content mode and parse the element's content as HTML.
>
> My thinking when I made<title>  switch to the HTML mode was that this was
> necessary for supporting<ruby>, which I am told is necessary for a good
> internationalisation story. Also, it's unclear which SVG elements one
> should use within<title>  to annotate languages, which I am told is
> necessary for both internationalisation and accessibility (in HTML, the
> <span lang="">  element would seem the obvious choice).
>
> I don't have a strong opinion on this issue; can the SVG WG confirm that
> <ruby>  support within<title>  is not desired and that there is some
> SVG-specific way of doing language annotation, or that language annotation
> is not needed for<title>? If so, adopting this proposal seems like a good
> idea.

In SVG Tiny 1.2, for simplicity, we restricted <title> and <desc> to 
text elements.  We are open to more creative solutions, and your 
explanation seems to make good sense.

The SVG equivalent of <span lang=""> is <tspan xml:lang="">.  We 
considered making the content model of the <title> and <desc> elements 
match that of the <svg:text> element, but also wish to allow X/HTML 
content for document semantics like lists and such.  Up until this 
point, the SVG+X/HTML story was unclear, but with browsers natively 
implementing SVG, we now have an opportunity to sort this out.  (Do note 
that there are SVG-only UAs, so any solution there would have to only 
optionally use HTML.)  Any thoughts or comments along those lines?

Regarding <ruby> [1], I don't see a reason that ruby markup couldn't be 
used in SVG, assuming it is properly namespaced (I guess it's the XHTML 
ns?) for the SVG-XML.  Obviously, SVG text has different layout rules 
than HTML, but the semantics would remain the same.  I've CCed the i18n 
folks to comment further, if they have opinions. (And what good i18n 
person doesn't? :) )

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs

Received on Wednesday, 11 March 2009 00:39:37 UTC