Re: [svg-developers] focusHighlight must be inheritable (ISSUE-2068, ACTION-2226)

Hi, Chris-

Chris Peto wrote (on 9/23/08 5:20 AM):
> 
> I have over 500 svg planes that I import into a svg program over getURL,
> because the “focusHighlight” is not inheritable I would have to go and
> reedit all 500 planes.  Sorry, I will not do this nor my customer pay for
> such an act.  This leads to the fact that none of the browsers that support
> this new feature can be used, so back to IE and ASV.  Not good!
> 
> This also goes for “focusable” attribute.

The SVG WG has discussed this in light of your content, and while we
have decided against changing the “focusHighlight” and “focusable”
attributes to be inheritable for SVG 1.2 Tiny, we believe that your
concern can be addressed by particular implementations.

There are two implementation-specific behaviors that underly the
solution to your particular problem.

1) The precise appearance of the highlight is left up to the User Agent.
 The lacuna ("default") value is 'auto' [1], which states that:
[[
This indicates that the element should be highlighted on focus. The
highlighting method is left up to the SVG user agent.
]]

So, the highlight effect can be very obvious, or it can be more subtle.
 It can even vary from element to element, as appropriate.  In the
future, we may allow the author to define a visual effect to apply as
their preferred highlight method.  Currently, Opera (which you had
expressed interest in using for your case) uses a rather overt (and in
my opinion, attractive) blue "bounding box" to show the highlight, but
they have the leeway to change this as a result of user feedback; you
can register your preference with them and other browser vendors.


2) There is currently latitude in what events cause a User Agent gives
focus to an element. Currently, Opera interprets either a mouseclick or
a keyboard navigation as a "DOMFocusIn" event, which triggers the
“focusHighlight” attribute's behavior.  However, based on feedback, they
are considering triggering it only on keyboard navigation, which should
address your concern; again, you can register your preference with
browser vendors directly.

We believe that this browser-specific behavior also addresses the
related concerns you have with the “focusable” attribute, which would
cause considerable implementation and authoring challenges if it were
inheritable.

That is the short-term solution.  For the long-term, we will be
clarifying and tightening up these ambiguities in SVG 2.0 Core, and we
will keep your use case in mind while doing so.  We hope also to work
with the CSS WG to revisit this as a possible CSS property, and such a
property would most likely be inheritable.

Please let us know promptly whether or not this response satisfies your
comment.


[1] http://dev.w3.org/SVG/profiles/1.2T/publish/interact.html#FocusHighlight

Regards-
-Doug, on behalf of the SVG WG

Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 05:02:55 UTC