proposal for this link/tspan discussion

Isn't it great to see a whole thread develop (ie. start,
move into the discussion phase, then the argument phase,
then the "what was it that we were talking about" phase)
during a single night's sleep (for me).

Here is something I've been thinking of recently (does not 
represent the SVG WG):

Remove <a> from SVG.

As has been discussed in the thread, <a> causes all sorts
of content model problems. Maybe someone has enumerated them
and checked to see what schema languages will be able to
solve the problems? Maybe there is only one content model
problem (PCDATA vs content similar to <g>)? I don't know.

Why can't every element be a link? We allow an xlink:href
on every element (I think this was one of the goals of xlink).

There are some elements (eg. <linearGradient>, <pattern>,
<filter>, <tref>, <image> etc) that define xlink:href to mean
something other than a traditional link (more like, go get the
referenced content and do something with it). I'd like to see
those attributes replaced with "ref".

Of course, this breaks nearly everything as we know it, and is
too huge a change for a minor version of SVG. However, I think
XHTML 2.0 are showing us a potential path, and I like 
some aspects of the direction in which they are headed.

No need for preliminary discussion phase on this one. You
can move straight to the "name calling" phase.

Dean (noting that Chris is on vacation, so is unable to tell
me why I'm wrong for at least a week)

Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 21:25:14 UTC