SVG, APIs, DOM and ARIA

Hi,

there was a bit of a discussion on this in the minutes of the last call.  
Here is a rough explanation...

SVG goes in its own DOM, unless it is included inline (which you can do  
with XHTML but not currently with HTML in many browsers). You can get at  
the DOM (modulo security blocking it) from one to the other anyway,  
according to the rules defined by the CDF group [1]. This works in  
practice in Opera, too.

SVG is primarily a graphics language. It has a little semantics - there  
are links, things that can be activated, and descriptions and titles that  
can be scattered around. So these things should go to the accessibility  
API, and should be navigable. We have done some of that in Opera, and are  
working on completing it.

Finally, if you make interactive stuff in SVG you should really use ARIA -  
and the user agent should expose that. The first issue is that the spec is  
in flux as we try to figure out how to make it work with HTML (the  
majority of Web Content) as well as XHTML/XHTML2/SVG/other XML (the sort  
of thing where we can expect more people to be tagging things nicely for  
accessibility). The second issue is that nobody, as far as I know, has  
shipped this yet. We are hoping to do so in Q1 2008, although it would  
probably still be an experimental implementation and need further work.

In theory of course you can also use stuff like Xforms in SVG. This has  
been done experimentally a couple of times, in Deng and Xsmiles, but I  
don't know of a cleanly working implementation.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals              Try the Kestrel - Opera 9.5 alpha

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 08:08:43 UTC