- From: Jonathan Watt <jwatt@jwatt.org>
- Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:35:56 +0000
- To: Jonathan Watt <jwatt@jwatt.org>
- CC: www-xml-linking-comments@w3.org, www-svg@w3.org, public-cdf@w3.org
Dear XML WG, I haven't received a response from the WG to the issue I raised below, but I see you're going to CR. Could I know the status of this issue please? Regards, Jonathan Jonathan Watt wrote: > > XLink WG, > > The current XLink 1.1 WD doesn't indicate clearly how conforming XLink > 1.1 applications should treat a simple link when the 'show' or 'actuate' > attributes are omitted (at least not in section 5.6 alongside the > description of the attributes where clarification would be most useful). > For example, what behavior should result from: > > <foo xlink:href="picture.gif">bar</foo> > > Should it be treated as if it had xlink:show="replace"? Or as if it had > xlink:show="embed"? Or perhaps it's intended to be unspecified and left > up to the XLink application to decide how to behave? > > I think the expected behavior should be made clear, even if just to say > explicitly that it is unspecified by the XLink specification, and XLink > applications may behave differently. However, what I'd actually prefer, > and what I think it would be most helpful, is if some text along the > following lines were to be added to section 5.6. > > If the show or actuate attributes are not specified, the > behavior of conforming XLink applications can be determined > by the specification, if any, governing the namespace of > the element. In other words, when omitted, conforming XLink > applications should behave as if the value "other" were > specified for these attributes. If the behavior is not > specified by any other specification or by some other > governing rules, then the behavior is unspecified. In this > case XLink applications may differ in their behavior. > > I think text along these lines would be helpful for two reasons. Firstly > it will allow some of the conflicts between the SVG specifications (and > existing SVG content) and XLink to be resolved. For the following > elements in the SVG namespace: > > <a xlink:href="foo">bar</a> > > the desired behavior is as if xlink:show="replace" and > xlink:actuate="onRequest" had been specified. But for: > > <image xlink:href="foo"/> > > the desired behavior is as if xlink:show="embed" and > xlink:actuate="onLoad" had been specified. However there is very little > (if any) SVG content that explicitly specifies the XLink 'show' and > 'actuate' attributes. Although the SVG 1.0 and 1.1 DTDs make these > attributes #FIXED, not all UAs load the DTD, and the next versions of > SVG won't have DTDs. > > As well as resolving some of the problems with the use of XLink in SVG, > the requested change to the XLink 1.1 WD would explicitly allow other > specs to use XLink without requiring authors of their content to know a > great deal about XLink, and without requiring them to repeatedly specify > the same attributes (show and actuate) with the same values on the same > elements over and over. > > I think both of those would be a good thing. > > Best regards, > Jonathan >
Received on Monday, 20 March 2006 23:38:14 UTC