Re: SVG 1.2 Comment: 4 Flowing text and graphics

At 01:41 PM 11/3/2004 -0800, Peter Sorotokin wrote:

>At 04:22 PM 11/3/2004 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> >
>> > Ever seen poetry laid out inside a shape? Ever seen ad text following
>> > the shiny curves of the latest spacecraft? Ever seen some sombre lament
>> > about the passing of time animated as it falls through an hourglass?
>> > *That* is what it's for. It's for text when used as graphics.
>>
>>All three of those examples are great examplies of documents that need
>>semantic markup.
>
>Might - or might not. What is your point: that the feature can be abused 
>or that the feature _never_ does the right thing?
>
>I gave (earlier in this thread), these three examples: maps, schematics 
>and diagrams.
>
>Just look at basically any printed map and you'll see a lot of line breaks 
>(definitely *every* one of my AAA maps uses multi-line labels a lot). 
>Complex diagrams and schematics also use them quite a bit. What is even 
>more important in all of the above cases is that *text is in the shape*. 
>It might not even have word wrapping there, it might be, in fact, a single 
>word, but it is extremely important that it is simply *placed* in the shape.
>
>Yet another example is almost anything produced in modern illustration 
>authoring tools, such as Illustrator or CorellDraw. Text in these drawings 
>cannot be accurately captured in SVG 1.1.
>
>>  Sure, they are presented with lovely shapes. But at the
>>heart of the issue, they are still text, and it would make just as much
>>sense for them to be rendered aurally using a speech CSS stylesheet, or to
>>a TTY using a UA's built-in styling rules, or to have them indexed using
>>Semantic Web inference rules.
>>
>>If those three examples are examples of when multiline text is to be used
>>in SVG, then multiline text in SVG should be done by applying SVG to
>>documents in other markup languages, not by adding more text markup to
>>SVG, in clear violation of both AWWW and WCAG.
>
>Again, according to this (quite radical I should say) argument, SVG must 
>not have any text whatsoever. Text is still text, even if it is only a 
>single word. It does not matter for anything above that text is multiline. 
>Along the same lines as above, one could even easily argue that SVG itself 
>should

"should not", of course

>have happened, as fundamentally, anything that SVG has lacks semantics: 
>there should not be an svg:circle element, but there should be, say, 
>cosmos:sun and cosmos:earth. If you disagree with a need for purely 
>presentational languages in principle (and SVG is presentational language, 
>XSL:FO is another and SMIL to some extent too), than there is little point 
>in arguing about particular features of such languages.
>
>Right now people position diagram/map/schematics/illustration labels 
>absolutely. You are saying that if we give them ability to do exactly the 
>same thing, but express a connection between the label and the shape, so 
>that tools and UAs can actually extract that connection, that will somehow 
>worsen accessibility? I think it will improve it.
>
>Again, I am all for the integration with CSS flows in the future, but it 
>should not prevent SVG 1.2 from adding purely presentational, graphics 
>layout features to the language, even if it has to do with text.
>
>Peter
>
>
>>--
>>Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
>>http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
>>Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>

Received on Wednesday, 3 November 2004 21:51:49 UTC