Re: Towards resolution of SVG 1.2 Flowing text

At 10:42 AM 11/2/2004 -0500, Robert O'Callahan wrote:

>I have a couple of additional questions for the SVG WG:
>
>-- When users ask for additional flowing text features, such as floats and 
>tables, will you add them to SVG 1.3?

I do not see SVG adding either floats or tables, these are advanced text 
layout features and unlike line breaks they are not inherent to text flow.

For instance, look at the drawing tools: basically, all of them have line 
breaking; I do not know of any that would allow floats or tables.

IMHO, down the road I can see addition of some sort of grid coordinates 
(instead of simple percentages that SVG has today), but it would be 
primarily graphics layout facility more similar to Java GridBagLayout than 
to CSS tables. Maybe CSS table layout can be extended itself, I have not 
looked closer at this point.


>-- You say that SVG text is presentational and not semantic, but then why 
>does flowPara exist?

Because paragraphs are inherent to text. Even "dumb text" ASCII-only 
messages on this thread have them. When we go from pure text to XML we 
"lose" "newline character" and there are two main uses to it: delimiting 
paragraphs and explicit line breaks (e.g. in poetry). It would not have 
been correct to always map newline to an explicit line break (paragraph 
boundary is actually much more important than explicit line break). 
Alternatively we could have used a single element for these two cases, but 
that seems artificial and would be counterintuitive to the users.

Peter


>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 Tuesday, 2 November 2004 16:15:45 UTC