Re: More on SVG within HTML pages

Simon Pieters wrote:
> 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.

Suggestion: take a random svg image out of wikipedia and search for 
"sodipodi".  Getting rid of the errors in a small portion of the image 
isn't going to undo the damage to both the adoption of SVG or the 
adoption of the conformance checker by flagging the remaining "errors".

- Sam Ruby

Received on Monday, 7 September 2009 18:09:03 UTC