SVG2, the fondleslab keyboard initialisation and some other musings from the designers point of view.

Hi all,

Through a linkedIn forum on SVG I encountered the following problem. As  
SVG 1.1 has no text input method, a keyboard will not initialise to  
capture keyboard events (as a tablet has none). I couldn't find any  
thoughts on the issue of text input methods in SVG 2.0 and was wondering  
how this might be adressed. Using non-standard libraries currently is the  
only way to change a text in situ, whereas it would be nice if it would  
become possible.

I recall something like the attribute "editable", but it would be a  
godsend if there was a nice text input method that is being recognised by  
browsers as the trigger to init a keyboard if there is none physically  
attached to the device (speech would be another I guess). Can't find it in  
the draft for SVG 2 at least. As the SVG 2 is supposed to be a development  
for the future, it may be handy to discuss (again, no doubt) the desire to  
edit some text in situ rather than popping up some foreign object to enter  
text and pipe that back to the text you'd like to edit. Something sadly  
missing in 1.1

In combination with the new text flow mechanisms SVG would be vastly more  
useful in displaying text for those sites that would love to skip the  
horrific typography unfriendly methods of HTML. I'm sure that the designer  
community would applaud anything that can get them rid of the ugly type  
handling of HTML and the crude display of letters.

Okay,.. sadly SVG fonts is not supposed to make it though it might save  
some megabytes of data having to be sent to those that don't need the full  
character sets of Tradional Chinese and the like that will have to be sent  
in WoFF, OpenType or all those nice binary formats with hinting. But  
surely you can feel for the desire of the graphics designers that SVG is  
ultimately geared for to replace the crud that has terrorised their eyes  
the past 20+ years.

On regard of SMIL I'd like to ask how you imagine a library of animations  
to get reused with xlink using CSS3 and javascript? Using SMIL one can  
patch together a library of objects and create a nice scene and either  
resue the object or replace them with others. An ideal situation for all  
those animated banner designers out there that would love to use such a  
method to avoid the button clicking and actionscripting currently used in  
Flash. Just doing all the animation using CCS files and the objects in SVG?

How feasible is that if you want something more elaborate than a fade in  
and out for a button? Making multiple scenes in SVG and SMIL was fairly  
straightforward once you seperated the logic and the objects and could  
<use> the logic parts to call the objects. I gather there might be a bit  
of a security issue here with animating multiple filtered object to get a  
100% processor use, but I doubt that has really changed as you can do that  
in javascript as well. Is it really only about all browser vendors to pass  
the ACID X.0 tests?

Also,.. if anyone has information on how to initialise a keyboard on a  
tablet (I hope there is some generic method, but any hint where to look  
for will do), could you please inform me. A search on this topic hasn't  
lead me to any useful information yet.

Regards,

Jelle Mulder

Received on Monday, 8 April 2013 22:19:00 UTC