RE: SVG Mania and the Sematic Web

From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of Jim Ley

> As SVG in now becoming installed in more and more devices, and is
native in
> Mozilla,

SVG is certainly not native in Mozilla, it's available in special mozilla
builds and is far from release quality.

Well, I was just reading what is on the Mozilla site

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

Native SVG vs. plug-in SVG
The Mozilla SVG implementation is a native SVG implementation. This is as
opposed to plug-in SVG viewers such as the Adobe viewer (which is currently
the most popular SVG viewer).
* could we see the default document type on the web becoming .svg,
> given it's power and presentation?  I can see a lot of people wanting
to
> design like this.  I don't have a problem with it because it is XML
based.

That would be an absolute disaster for accessibility, SVG has very few
accessibility features and those that are available (like css) cannot be
used without rendering the content inaccessible.  SVG due to some
compromises in the design (such as "z-index" support) does not allow for
sensible grouping and description in the general case, and also it often
relies on position to give information yet provides no mechanism to
describe that position in a meaningful manner.  There's also problems
with lack of any non pointer based interaction.  There are many good
features though, and with metadata you can make the content accessible -
however, that's really just providing a metadata version of the document
and that works with all different document types.

Interesting.
> There is a side issue of dynamic SVG replacing dynamic HTML, especially
for
> pull down menus.  Does this have the same accessibility issues, or does
it
> overcome some or many of them.

It adds lots of new ones, whilst solving none from well authored dynamic
HTML, that is not the place for SVG,   SVG is about graphics semantics
not doing drop down menus etc.

Yes but SVG does interact with the DOM via ECMAScript.  You can do a lot of
stuff with that just like Dynamic HTML

http://www.xfront.org/svgdemo/

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2001-11-08-a.html

Geoff

Received on Monday, 2 December 2002 07:16:27 UTC