Re: [SVG1.0] no tspan allowed inside an anchor?

"Thomas E Deweese" <thomas.deweese@kodak.com>
>    Since, you _really_ don't want to have tspans outside of a text
> elements and since 'a' can appear almost anywhere the decision was
> made to not allow tspan in an a.

What I've never fully understood is the motivation for tspan anyway, this
wouldn't be an issue if tspan didn't exist (and instead text could be a
child of text.)  The difference in allowed attributes is minimal, and I
can't see anything obvious which would prevent this.

So what is the motivation for the existence of tspan?

> You can always get the same result
> by adding some additional 'a' elements in your text element (you may
> have to break up a single logical 'a' into several smaller a's that
> don't span tspans.

This is somewhat unfortunate though, and certainly isn't "the same
result", as it means navigation through the document via links means that
you have repeated links, and the link text can be confusing. (Ideally I'd
want the link text to be "The SVG specification", and not 3 links to
"The", "SVG" and "specification", the information given there is _very_
different.)

>    You will of course point out that because 'a' can have things like
> 'path' 'g' 'circle' the problem really wasn't solved by this decision
> it was just changed:
>
> <text ...> <a ...> <circle .. ></a> </text> <!-- DTD valid -->
>
>    To which one might answer, oh well can't fix everything.

It might be very useful to have that mark-up though, so you can position
a circle relative to some text, something which I can't seem to manage at
the moment - expect an issue in this area once I've fleshed it out into
something postable...

Jim.

Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 08:20:37 UTC