Embedding and scripting within SVG

Hi SVG-ites,

Reading the SVG specification and a quick search on the public SVG 
mailing list suggests that there is a strong interest in embedding
SVG in HTML or other host languages. The discussion on embedding
foreign object types in the 6th July '99 working draft suggests that
the embedded object is likely to be a renderable XML fragment.

Clearly SVG is targetted primarily as 2d graphics description language,
but browsers are likely to be the most frequent rendering environment.
In a browser, interactivity is key.

Briefly, I see benefits in being able to embed Java applets and assign
JavaScript code fragments to events similar to HTML. These embedded
objects are relatively 'opaque' to XML parsers.

The up-side is interactivity and re-use of existing code components. 

The down-side is that few pure SVG renderers could do anything meaningful
with an embedded applet. Event-handlers are not a problem as they can
be simply ignored by a renderer that doesn't support interaction so 
this falls cleanly within the scope of SVG's goals.

It would be possible to offset the inability to render the graphical
representation of, say, a running Java applet by providing a static
image (JPG, PNG) as a fallback rendering. This would require some
additional syntax in SVG as the image-rendering should be done by
the SVG engine.

I'm not a member of this alias, but I would welcome feedback on these
proposals; please cc me on responses.

Thanks for your time!

Colm Smyth
WT SE Sun Microsystems Ireland

Received on Thursday, 3 February 2000 06:07:07 UTC