Re: SVG 1.2 Comment: Flowing text and graphics

Peter Sorotokin wrote:
>> So the problem is that you need an order on your areas and an SVG 
>> shape would not provide that?  But surely one can use an ordered list 
>> of SVG shapes?
> 
> Given a choice of inventing a new attribute syntax (list of URLs) or a 
> new mark-up, I'd invent new mark-up.

There are two issues with new mark-up:

1)  Conceptual brain-print.  Instead of reusing an existing concept (shapes) new
     concepts are introduced.
2)  Error-handling is much more complicated to define.  For example, there is no
     indication how flowRegions outside flowRoots are to be treated, nor
     flowRegions that are children of random elements (eg <g>) that are children
     of flowRoots.  The RelaxNG schema is not sufficient for this purpose, since
     it's of no use to applications that use a non-validating parser and since
     people _will_ produce documents that don't conform to the schema (it's
     happening with XHTML, and I've commonly seen it happening with both XUL and
     XBL).  Further, DOM modification can easily produce a DOM that doesn't
     comply with the schema even in an application with a validating parser.
     Therefore, implementations will need to make sense of various DOMs that may
     arise, and how they do so needs to be specified.  Generally, the complexity
     of such specification grows exponentially in the number of
     possibly-interacting element types... That may not be the case here, but
     it's hard to tell, since no error-handling provisions at all are made in
     this section.

> You propose there is another property for exclusion regions? How could I 
> exclude something only from one region, but not others?

Isn't that just a matter of appropriately defining your shape to not include 
that region to start with?

Or am I misunderstanding the question?

>> flowRef does need something to reference, but it's not clear to me why 
>> flowRef is needed...
>

> flowRef is needed if you want to reference only something which is flown 
> in a particular region, possibly multiple times.

Yes, I realize that.  But what is the use case for this?

>> In other words, I think you can simply reference the CSS3 Text 
>> property without placing additional restrictions on it, I believe.
> 
> Is it stable, though?

CSS3 Text is in CR.  I don't recall what the state of CSS3 Text moving our of CR 
is, and I recall there being possibilities of some features being dropped or 
reworked due to lack of implementations.

That said, I'm pretty certain that text-align is _not_ one of those features. 
An email to www-style@w3.org to verify this may be in order, of course.  ;)

-Boris

Received on Monday, 29 November 2004 21:43:16 UTC