Re: [svgwg] Implementing CSS Text Wrapping in SVG (#942)

Glad to see enthusiasm on this topic! A few observations about your thoughts:

### Simplicity 

The overall goals here are simplicity of implementation and familiarity to authors. CSS text layout is the easiest way to accomplish those goals.

An implementation doesn't need to support all of CSS to do this, only those parts of CSS that are applicable to SVG. I'm not aware of any major SVG authoring tool that doesn't support at least a subset of CSS, so I don't see the need to add new presentation attributes.

If an implementation's CSS support is lacking, it would be no harder for them to improve their text layout with CSS syntax than with attribute syntax.

I agree that wrapping text in shapes is unneeded complexity. It has its use cases, but it shouldn't impede the most common case, rectangular blocks of text.

### No new syntax

Browsers aren't going to add new elements or attributes. They just aren't. If anything, they're inclined to remove features from SVG.

So asking for additional elements or attributes is simply a non-starter, unfortunately.

Naturally, I agree with your use cases. So we should find a way to leverage existing SVG or CSS syntax and features to accomplish those goals.

In the case of a `<tbreak>`, you could simply embed the next text section in a `<tspan dy="2em">`. That would add the visual break. A screen reader could (and should) treat `tspan` elements as paragraphs, generally. You could even style the `tspan` to have whatever margin you want, with no need to change the attribute.

### Convertors

Any authoring tool based on a browser engine (e.g. an Electron app or a web-based authoring tool) would already have the same support as the browser.

For other authoring tools (e.g. Inkscape or Illustrator), they could simply add the support natively. It's not that much extra work, and they already have text-layout tools; they'd just need to align those to CSS layout.

Of course, it would be nice to have a convertor from automatic to manual text-wrapping SVG for older versions of authoring tools, but honestly that would be trivial to make. I don't see this as a serious roadblock.

### Conclusion

In short, the simpler and less demanding the request, the more likely it will be implemented and deployed. Browsers, not other SVG tools, are the blocker for interoperable improvements to SVG. 

The simplest ask is for browsers to allow SVG to use their existing CSS text-wrapping, with no special cases or new elements or attributes.

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Received on Monday, 16 December 2024 22:18:35 UTC