- From: Jon Ferraiolo <jon.ferraiolo@adobe.com>
- Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 17:43:54 -0700
- To: bulia byak <buliabyak@gmail.com>, www-svg@w3.org
Bulia, The white space handling rules in SVG 1.0/1.1/1.2 were based on some degree of sound reasoning, some degree of unsound reasoning, and some degree of compromise with the internationalization team at the W3C. I won't attempt to say what things fall into which category. It is what it is, for better or worse. xml:space="default" was meant to allow for HTML-style white space behavior where auto-magical things happen such as multiple consecutive white space characters getting consolidated into a single white space character. I think you understand this goal. The newline removal "feature" was to some degree a compromise for internationalization reasons. The thinking (for better or worse) is that certain scripts such as Japanese do not have space characters such as you find in European languages. But you sometimes want to break long strings of Japanese text into multiple lines. For these reasons, the rule was adopted that newline characters are just dropped so that long strings of Japanese text (or other scripts) would not get erroneous space characters. For better or worse, that's how the standard was approved in 2001, and there is a lot of software out there which has implemented these rules. My personal opinion is that SVG's approach to white space handling is poorly designed and should be fixed at some point when a good opportunity comes up for making such changes. However, I do not think that SVG 1.2 is the appropriate time because the existing standard isn't broken, just suboptimally designed. Perhaps it will be a good time to make a change in this area when the W3C makes further progress integrating its languages via its Compound Documents activities. Jon At 07:35 AM 4/24/2005, bulia byak wrote: >Both 1.1 and 1.2 Mobile draft state: > > When xml:space="default", the SVG user agent will do the following >using a copy of the original character data content. First, it will >remove all newline characters. > >Can someone please explain the rationale of the requirement to remove >all newlines, as opposed to (much more natural) converting them to >spaces? I think this is very counterintuitive. > >-- >bulia byak >Inkscape. Draw Freely. >http://www.inkscape.org
Received on Monday, 25 April 2005 13:11:39 UTC