Re: SVG in text/html

Hi, Jeff-

Jeff Schiller wrote (on 3/26/09 12:23 AM):
> On 3/25/09, Jeff Schiller<codedread@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>   In my mind, the person who is going to hand-author SVG-in-HTML fits
>>   into one of three categories (with apologies to Mark Pilgrim [1]):
>>
>>   1) They don't know what they're doing.  Let's call these people Morons.
> ...
>>   [1] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/08/16/specs
>
> Let me apologize up front for this one.

As well you should!  That article is out of context, it's talking about 
UA developers, not content authors. :)

Seriously, most content authors are really people who normally do 
something else, and don't have time to dig into standards, or learn how 
to do something complicated.  They want something that Just Works, and 
probably don't have time or patience to debug it deeply.  They don't 
care about the purity of XML, nor about the robustness of 
error-correction; they want to be shown exactly how to do something so 
it Just Works.

I'm sure both sides of this issue think they are best serving those 
authors.  I've heard the argument that some result is better than none; 
that may be so... maybe it will be encouraging to see some/any result, 
even if it's not was intended.  I tend to think that getting an 
ambiguous result is worse than getting no result, since it isn't as 
obvious how to back out.

But maybe the average developer will simply rely on the tools... a 
special case of "the tools will save us."  I hope it is the exception to 
the general rule that that's a dangerous assumption.

I will note that I'm encouraged that SVG inline in HTML will be given a 
serious round of implementation, and that at least code conforming to 
normal SVG (the SVG supported by current UAs) will also be supported, in 
addition to the crappy error-corrected code.

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

Received on Thursday, 26 March 2009 05:19:57 UTC