svg textLength issue (and a little thing about use...)

Hi,

The textLength attribute on SVG's textLength causes accesibility problems
for users who use their own stylesheets to overide author selections.

Consider:
   <text font-size="20px" textLength="38px"
lengthAdjust="spacingAndGlyphs">Hello</text>

Which will work fine if the font-size is close to the 20px, the
adjustments whilst making the font slightly less clear shouldn't have too
much effect on legibility.

However if the user takes advantage of CSS2 to increase the font-size to
something they find legible, the resulting narrow letters will likely be
unreadable for them.  I do not see any mechanism for a user to override
the textLength property in their user stylesheet, yet a user would need
this ability to adjust font-size.

If the lengthAdjust="spacing" then as a single character of the users
font could easily be 38px, I'm not sure what's supposed to happen then,
the spec. appears to be silent on the issue of what happens when the two
calculatated values are radically different, but Batik stacks the letters
on top of each other which seems reasonable.

I do not have any ideas to propose as a solution unfortunately.


The other is a little thing about use:

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/struct.html#UseElement
| When a 'use' references another element which is another
| 'use' or whose content contains a 'use' element, then the
| deep cloning approach described above is recursive.

I believe it should be made explicit what should be done in the situation
where a 'use' element, references a 'use' element which refers back to
the original one. ( http://jibbering.com/2002/8/use.test.svg ) as reading
it currently a conforming UA should keep on recursing forever... (and
Batik does!)

Jim.

Received on Friday, 16 August 2002 05:57:49 UTC