Re: More on SVG within HTML pages

On Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:21:55 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

>> More importantly, this is a HTML5 failure in waiting, because if people  
>> inline SVG, chances are they will inline whatever SVG they find in the  
>> wild, which may or may not include RDF/XML. Validly include, may I add,  
>> in fact recommended when it comes to annotating Creative Commons  
>> license info.
>
> I agree. This problem has no good solutions, as far as I can tell.
>
>   1) Leave RDF/XML-looking stuff non-conforming. Bad because copy- 
> pasting leads to a lot of errors about stuff that browsers will  
> ignore--just like they ignore the contents of <metadata> in XML.
>   2) Perform full Namespace processing in <metadata> subtrees. Bad  
> because this would introduce considerable complexity in order to shuffle  
> around namespaces of stuff that browsers (and so far even validators!)  
> end up ignoring. Adding a lot of complexity to tweak the DOM only so  
> that it can be ignored doesn't make sense.
>   3) Leaving the DOM building as-is but proclaiming the RDF/XML-looking  
> stuff that infoset-wise isn't RDF/XML as conforming. Bad because it  
> would make authors believe that they are actually using RDF/XML and  
> worse because if someone wanted to consume that data as RDF, they'd need  
> to have dual code paths for text/html and XML (and the DOM Consistency  
> Design Principle is all about avoiding that situation).

  4) Make SVG <metadata> a RAWTEXT element. This will silence the validator  
with little effort on Henri, while allowing authors to invoke an XML  
parser on its textContent to get the same stuff as they get when using  
XML, with more or less the same code path as when using XML directly. It  
would still allow validators to validate the contents if they want to.  
This has the drawback that if authors copy-and-paste only the start tag  
and only test in legacy browsers, the rest of the page will be eaten in  
new browsers. The content model of the SVG <metadata> element would need  
to change to allow plain text, at least in text/html.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Monday, 7 September 2009 17:40:20 UTC