Re: %descTitle on <text>

Jan,
Thanks for pointing this out. There has been recent consideration of adding
<desc> and <title> as children of a <text> (we noticed the same thing), but it
may not happen due to the constraints of XML and DTDs. You see, SVG has been
defined to allow only at most one <desc> and at most one <title>, and both
need
to be before any other children. But <text> allows #PCDATA as content, and the
XML 1.0 spec has contraints about elements which have #PCDATA content where
you
can't restrict the number or order of any child elements. (See
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-mixed-content. The first two sentences there
say "An element type has mixed content when elements of that type may contain
character data, optionally interspersed with child elements. In this case, the
types of the child elements may be constrained, but not their order or their
number of occurrences".)

Alternatives include releasing the constraints on <desc> and <title> (i.e.,
allow them anywhere and allow any number of them) or to leave things as they
are (i.e., do not allow <desc> and <title> on <text> instead, if you want to
provide <desc> and <title>, wrap the <text> inside a <g>). My opinion is that
the latter alternative (i.e., leave things as they are) is the better
decision.

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG Editor
Adobe Systems Incorporated

At 03:28 PM 1/24/00 +0100, Jan Aarsaether wrote:
>
>SVG'ers
>
>We just noticed that <text> does not have <desc> and <title>
>attributes in the latest specs (WD-SVG-19991203) we have found. Is
>this an error in the specs or is it designed this way? If so, what
>makes <text> so different from the other drawing elements (basic
>shapes) that all have %descTitle. We could use the class attribute for
>our purposes, but we would first like someone to confirm that
>%descTitle is really missing from <text> and if so, why.
>
>Thanks!
>
>---
>Jan Aarsaether                 jaa@metis.no
>METIS GUI Development  
>NCR Norge AS
>
>PS:
>We managed to work our way around the problem with missing width and
>height attributes for <text>, but we're not happy with being forced to
>add our own semantics 'on top of' SVG solve a problem SVG should IOHO
>support natively. Such limitations might threaten the universal
>adoption, and thus success, of SVG! What a shame if SVG was reduced to
>just-another-graphics format on the web :-<
>

Received on Monday, 24 January 2000 13:34:00 UTC