Re: name of 'filter' property and corresponding CSSStyleDeclaration property

Hi, Cameron-

It's something to consider... I'm not going to jump to the conclusion
that renaming the 'filter' property is the right solution, since that
might be a bit drastic for legacy content, viewers, and authoring tools.

Moreover, it's not clear that renaming 'filter' will, at this point,
solve anything... there will still be legacy SVG content out there, just
as there is (legacy?) IE-filter content out there.  A UA which wishes to
account for both will have to implement accordingly.

I don't know how common the IE-filter content is, nor whether it's still
being used in modern content.  Maybe Hixie (or another Googler) could do
a survey using Google's database.

I think Maciej is exaggerating a bit when he says that this has been
raised many times... as far as I can see, Hixie raised it once [1] in
the context of a larger discussion, and pretty much everyone on the
thread (not just the SVG WG) disagreed that it would be an issue (for
example, Jim Ley [2] pointed out that the syntax differences makes
parsing it easy, though that seems not to address the cascade).  It's
possible that Maciej's use case is an aspect of the case that wasn't
discussed enough (use in HTML was discounted in that earlier
discussion), so I agree that we should figure out what the best strategy
forward is at this point.  We should look at exactly how IE-filter is
being used, and see if we can come up with an effective hack that allows
both to exist in harmony.


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Nov/0257.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2004Nov/0259.html

Regards-
-Doug

Cameron McCormack wrote (on 11/15/08 7:13 PM):
> Another point of conflict with “the rest of the web” that you’re
> all probably aware of, but which could be considered again given our
> impending work on SVG Core 2.0 (or whatever name will be used).
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> -----
> 
> From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
> Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:34:05 -0800
> To: David-Sarah Hopwood <david.hopwood@industrial-designers.co.uk>
> Cc: es3.x-discuss@mozilla.org, es-discuss@mozilla.org
> Subject: Re: Should host objects be able to have [[Class]] "Function",
>  "Array" etc.?
> 
> 
> On Nov 14, 2008, at 11:38 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
> 
>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> Specifically, we expose a "filter" property on CSSStyleDeclaration,  
>>> in
>>> support of the SVG filter CSS property. However, many sites test for
>>> "filter" to detect support for MSIE's proprietary "filter" property,
>>> which sadly has the same name but completely incompatible syntax.  
>>> Thus,
>>> we return this kind of magical undetectable string so if tests don't
>>> detect us as IE.
>>
>> If "many" sites are relying on the proprietary IE semantics, then it's
>> a bug in the CSSStyleDeclaration API that it has incompatible  
>> semantics.
>> Magical oddball strings won't fix this problem -- the correct long-term
>> fix is to rename the SVG 'filter' property so that it doesn't clash
>> with something that is incompatible and already widely used.
> 
> Magic oddball strings fixed the sites that were actually broken. We did not 
> do this just for fun, we ran into actual sites that had this problem. We 
> don't know of sites that have a problem with the current behavior.
> 
> I agree with you that the SVG 'filter' property should be renamed. This has 
> been raised many times with the SVG Working Group and they did not agree. 
> In any case I am not asking for advice on our compatibility strategy, just 
> explaining it. If you'd like, I would be happy to raise it with the SVG WG 
> yet again, or you are welcome to do so yourself.
> 
> Regards,
> Maciej

Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 01:17:55 UTC