Re: SVG For data driven graphics

Jacob,
I took a quick look at the data driven graphics proposal. The SVG working 
group has looked at several similar proposals over the past couple of 
years, some from the public and some from the members of the working group. 
My assessment is that your proposal has a good amount of elegance (i.e., 
lots of power from some simple constructs) and is definitely one of the 
better proposals I have seen.

I haven't studied your proposal completely, but my sense is that there 
would need to be some additional work in order to achieve compatibility 
with SVG's processing model. Because of SVG's history of attempting to do 
the right thing with other W3C initiatives, there are various requirements 
in order to extend SVG with new functionality. With regard to your 
proposal, two things leap out at me as making it non-trivial to integrating 
your proposal as described on your web site into SVG: all of the 
complexities with SMIL, and the DOM2/DOM3 event model.

At least part of your functionality would be possible via sXBL components 
sitting on top of SVG 1.2 (which supports XPath evaluation via the DOM). 
You could have a <foo:binding> custom element defined in sXBL which 
contained a couple of XPath expressions as attributes, where one XPath 
pointed to the data and another pointed to an attribute in the SVG 
document. The component could evaluate the XPath expressions, register 
event listeners on the data (in particular, mutation event listeners), but 
maybe also could listen for newly downloaded data. When data changed, the 
component could update the given attribute.

But once again, I haven't had time to study your proposal in detail, so 
maybe my suggestions won't work.

Jon Ferraiolo
Adobe Systems, Inc.
sXBL co-editor


At 05:46 AM 9/29/2004, Jacob Lister wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>It's still a little rough, but with all the discussion going on about 
>sXBL,  I'd like to share my thoughts about dynamic SVG, and throw another 
>approach into the mix.
>See http://www.keystoneframework.org/doc_svgddg.html
>
>Jacob

Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2004 22:29:26 UTC