USE and CLONE

Hi,

The SVG use element, and the proposed RCC are very useful, but their
limiting if you want to place lots of identical graphic elements in a
document, but have each fully controllable later from SCRIPT contained
within the document.  I find myself often tempted to create an element in
script and then cloneNode it there to generate the document I want.  This
isn't particularly nice of course as it places a reliance on javascript for
even a static display.

To overcome this I propose a clone element, or an attribute modifying how
use behaves be added, the element would provide a direct clone of the
referenced content, with either ID's removed, or prefixed with an ID
specified in the clone element, e.g.

<svg width="10cm" height="3cm" viewBox="0 0 100 30" version="1.2.jim"
     xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <defs>
    <rect id="MyRect" width="60" height="10"/>
  </defs>
  <rect x=".1" y=".1" width="99.8" height="29.8"
        fill="none" stroke="blue" stroke-width=".2" />
  <clone x="20" y="10" xlink:href="#MyRect" />
  <clone x="20" y="10" xlink:href="#MyRect" />
</svg>

Would add a cloned MyRect rect element as a child of each of the clone
elements, the ID="MyRect" removed to ensure uniqueness of ID.

Alternatively the clone element could have an id-prefix attribute which
modified the behaviour, such that

<svg width="10cm" height="3cm" viewBox="0 0 100 30" version="1.2.jim"
     xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <defs>
    <rect id="MyRect" width="60" height="10"/>
  </defs>
  <rect x=".1" y=".1" width="99.8" height="29.8"
        fill="none" stroke="blue" stroke-width=".2" />
  <clone x="20" y="10" id-prefix="chicken" xlink:href="#MyRect" />
  <clone x="20" y="10" id-prefix="egg" xlink:href="#MyRect" />
</svg>

Would add a cloned MyRect with the ID being set to chickenMyRect and
eggMyRect.  The prefix isn't ideal as it makes it impossible for non SVG
aware validators to ensure that ID's are unique across documents, so it may
be more appropriate just to remove all of them.

The same behaviour could be obtained with an attribute on use instructing it
to clone rather use the instance root, since scripting support of use is
poorly implemented currently, this would likely have few legacy problems as
it would not impact the default rendering but would purely be related to
script.

Jim.

Received on Monday, 13 October 2003 11:23:46 UTC