Comments on SVG 1.2 from a Gecko developer

I was just looking through the spec at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20040318/ and I want to make some 
comments from the point of view of a browser implementor. I'm speaking 
on my own behalf and don't purport to officially represent Mozilla. My 
main concern is that this spec overlaps considerably with existing W3C 
recommendations:

-- The text flow elements in section 3 overlap considerably with regular 
HTML/CSS text layout.
-- "Focusable" seems like it should just resurrect the CSS3-UI proposed 
"user-focus" property. I'm not sure why it was dropped from CSS3-UI...
-- The tooltip support could just reuse the HTML 'title' attribute, as 
far as I can tell.
-- Instead of copying parts of SMIL into SVG, why not create a SMIL+SVG 
profile?
-- The SVG page support seems to overlap with CSS3 Paged Media.

In these cases, it seems that referring to the appropriate W3C 
recommendations (possibly using profiles to restrict what is appropriate 
inside SVG), or slightly extending those recommendations, would reduce 
work for implementors, authors and standards bodies. (Case in point: a 
browser that already does HTML+CSS won't want to reimplement text layout 
slightly differently for SVG.)

Some other features, such as the streaming attributes in section 9, and 
the DOM enhancements in section 17, seem to fall into the charters of 
SMIL and DOM if not the current SMIL and DOM recommendations. (The DOM 
group per se may be inoperative, but the work on general purpose DOM 
APIs still needs a venue of its own.)

Has the SVG WG given any thought to this problem? Is there any way we 
can avoid this overlap and the difficulties it will cause for 
implementors and authors?

Rob

-- 
Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. ... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We
have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the
Father, full of grace and truth." 1 John 1:1,14

Received on Thursday, 13 May 2004 14:51:05 UTC