URIs in an animation element’s ‘values’ attribute

• From: Cameron McCormack <cam@mcc.id.au>
• Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 20:34:30 +1000
• To: www-svg@w3.org
• Message-ID: <20060530103430.GA9046@port.mcc.id.au>

Hi.

SMIL Animation states¹, for the ‘values’ attribute on an animation
element:

  values = "<list>"
    A semicolon-separated list of one or more values. Vector-valued
    attributes are supported using the vector syntax of the
    attributeType domain.

however there is no stricter definition than that in the document, such
as a grammar.  (I suppose this may be because the values in the list can
be anything that the host language defines.)  Since the values in the
list could be URIs (for example when animating the ‘xlink:href’
attribute), there is some ambiguity:

  <animate attributeName="xlink:href" dur="3s" calcMode="discrete"
           values="http://example.org/a?one;two;three"/>

This could be interpreted as either one URI
(‘http://example.org/a?one;two;three’), since semicolons are valid
characters in a URI, or three URIs (‘http://example.org/a?one’, ‘two’
and ‘three’).  Which way should it be parsed?

Thanks,

Cameron

¹ http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-smil-animation-20010904/#ValuesAttribute

-- 
Cameron McCormack, http://mcc.id.au/
 xmpp:heycam@jabber.org  ▪  ICQ 26955922  ▪  MSN cam@mcc.id.au

Received on Tuesday, 30 May 2006 10:34:41 UTC