RE: What namespace features popular SVG tools really emit (ISSUE-37)

Hi Henri, I hate to quote out of context (and particularly where I confess not to really understand the context), but something about ...

"Yes. Firefox, Safari and Chrome fail to render "SVG" content that is  
not in the SVG namespace after parsing without external DTD  
processing, so developers of other SVG-enabled browsers seem to accept  
this level of incompatibility with legacy content in the case of SVG."

.... worries me.

a) Opera right now has by far (according to Jeff Schiller's tests against the test suite) the most extensive SVG support. Lot's of stuff just doesn't work in the other browsers because they don't yet support the spec.
b) You've forgotten to mention IE/ASV, which (though not completely standards compliant -- probably since it was built before the spec was finished) does render a very sizable chunk of SVG1.1. If something works in both Opera and IE/ASV, authors are likely to conclude that it works the way it is supposed to. Somewhere I have estimates on the size of the corpus of legacy content (that was relatively valid until about November of 2007 when Google changed its crawling algorithms rather dramatically). And the few million web pages (or whatever it was) that had SVG before Opera 8 came out are likely to become problem cases, since IE/ASV was the only game in town for a few years.
c) determining "proper" behavior on the basis of incomplete implementations may be misleading. I'd be tempted to follow Opera's lead here, since they appear to have given the issues considerably more thought than the young upstarts in these other little companies (Apple, Mozilla, Google, etc.).

I guess it sounds a bit like "don't break the web unless it's only SVG" though I'm sure that is not the intent.

If my failure to understand the context of the above quote nullifies the validity of my remarks, just say so and I will try not to wince. 

Cheers
David

Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2008 16:46:47 UTC