- From: Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>
- Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 23:08:32 +0100
- To: Peter Sorotokin <psorotok@adobe.com>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, www-svg@w3.org
Also sprach Peter Sorotokin: > > > 4 Flowing text and graphics > > > >This section seems to reinvent large parts of HTML and CSS (albeit in > >a semantically poorer manner) in order to achieve a single effect. > > I am puzzled. What exactly does it reinvent in HTML or CSS? Line breaks? > SVG 1.1 already has text layout within a line and text on the path. SVG 1.2 > does not add any semantic ("XHTML") features to SVG 1.1, it merely > introduces additional text layout mechanism, mostly built on top of SVG > 1.1. Why is it somehow OK to have single line text flow with all complex > internationalization features (baselines, bidi, vertical text, glyph > orientation) and text-on-the-path and somehow not OK to have (much simpler > to implement!) text in the shape? The problem lies in how different specs interact. Placing strings of text on a line or on a path nicely complements vector graphics and naturally belongs in SVG. When you add flowing text you turn SVG from a vector graphics format to a generic document format. This may be a simple change in your spec and code, but it has a huge impact on how content is authored on the web. HTML has traditionally had this role and making a second language duplicate the functionality seems to create unnecessary competition between specifications that would be better off collaborating. W3C's efforts in Compound Documents is a welcome effort to ensure that specs can collaborate in this manner. Another way to answer your question would be to turn it around: what exactly is wrong with CSS4 introducing polygons, background gradients and animation when we already have borders, background images and text-decoration: blink? > Also, our implementation feedback > is that you need to add about 10-20% of the code (was 10% in our code) in > the text layout module to get line breaking working even for arbitrary > shapes. All complexity in text layout comes from internationalization, and > incrementability, not line breaking. This is great, the simpler the better. But your code isn't tied to the author using SVG markup, is it? > As for your proposal, given our experience on text layout feature > design, it is unlikely that we have enough time to review it before > PR. I think it's wise to review last call comments before PR. Cheers, -h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
Received on Monday, 1 November 2004 21:09:18 UTC