Re: SVGT 1.2: A proposal for how to define SVG whitespace in terms of CSS whitespace

* Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>As requested by Jon Ferraiolo, here's a rough cut at reformulating  
>SVG whitespace handling in terms of style properties, to eventually  
>phase out use of xml:space and to be more compatible with a CDF  
>environment. I have Cc'd www-style because I believe that changes to  
>CSS may be required.

While xml:space suffers from people not understanding it and it beeing
underspecified in many environments, I don't think it's unfixable and
it's certainly more appropriate to use to convey certain semantics than
CSS. I don't see what's wrong with how SVG clarifies application level
behavior to ensure applications preserve the author's intention when
rendering text; the only problem here seems to be that many other specs
fail to provide such clarification.

It's true that SVG white space processing is a bit different from CSS
white space processing, but that's not really unexpected considering
that SVG 1.1 does not support text wrapping, for example. It might make
sense to add features to CSS to re-use the same white space processing
rules for other elements that we have for svg:text, etc. now, but this
would probably lead to interesting results once and if we try to figure
out how CSS and SVG interact for properties they don't share, like

  <svg:text style="white-space: pre" ...>

It seems it's unlikely this would suddenly turn svg:text into something
that supports multiple lines of text. I don't think we should change the
xml:space attribute such that it triggers some DOM transformations.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Monday, 30 January 2006 23:54:27 UTC