Another round on <image>

Dear SVG Experts,

We're working on the call-back system and having some trouble figuring
out what to do with the <image> elements.

According to specs, conforming implementations must support JPG, PNG
and SVG formats. Now I wonder, how do we find out what content type the
XLink in the <image> element refers to?

In our application, the two raster formats will be represented by one
kind of graphics primitive while the <svg> type will be represented by
a totally different kind of animal. This problem is probably not to
important in a (pure) svg-viewer, but in our interactive application,
this difference is important.

We've looked at the xlink:role attribute. This is the best candidate,
but I've still to see any kind of a standard 'classification'. Is
there such a thing? I mean, can we somehow decipher from the xlink:role
(or some other xlink attribute) value what content type the link is
referring to? If not, is anybody working on such a classification or
added functionality?

Of course, the xlink:href attribute value could be parsed to find the
file extension - but this is too IE'ish for my taste :-<  I would
really hope there is a better way! Please, tell me there is!!


--

And yes, before I forget, thanks for excellent help with my previous
questions :-> 

--jaa

Received on Thursday, 2 December 1999 11:06:02 UTC