Re: SVG12: #text traits

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> org.w3c.dom.svg is owned by W3C and formally defined in W3C Technical
> Reports. JSR-226's extensions to org.w3c.dom.svg are proprietary until
> there is W3C consensus about these extensions.

They are not extensions as they have been ratified by the SVG WG after a 
lengthy process of discussion and cooperation with the JSR 226 EG.

> It's also clear that the expert group and the SVG WG
> did not coordinate very well as JSR-226 is not a subset of and not
> binary compatible with the current Last Call Working Draft.

An editorial oversight has caused a small backwards compatibility issue 
which is being fixed, but to infer from that that there was poor 
coordination between the groups is very much mistaken, bordering on bad 
faith.

> Now, depending on whether and how the draft is changed to resolve all
> these problems it might make sense to keep the #text trait as depre-
> cated "backwards"-compatibility feature that must not be implemented
> for anything but <text>, where it behaves exactly as defined in JSR-
> 226 (and I do not think this is exactly like textContent).

As someone who fought long and hard against #text in many of the joint 
SVG WG/JSR 226 EG telcons (alas, without result) I can only support the 
limitation of its inclusion in SVG Tiny. However it would certainly not 
make any sense to remove it and break compatibility with JSR 226, which 
is already a finalized specification and already has shipping 
implementations.

> I would like to point out though that I've registered my concerns
> regarding #text and legacy interfaces in the SVG DOM subset long ago,
> 
>   http://www.w3.org/mid/41e46161.181259968@smtp.bjoern.hoehrmann.de
>   http://www.w3.org/mid/4216ac75.23952484@smtp.bjoern.hoehrmann.de
> 
> It seems, by formally addressing my comments and regular publication
> of Working Drafts such incompatibilities could have been avoided.

Given that they were discussed in the WG and had an impact on the 
specification I doubt that formally replying to them would have made any 
difference. Also, at the time you made your comments JSR-226 had already 
a frozen specification for over half a year.

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

Received on Tuesday, 24 May 2005 02:31:38 UTC