Re: Clean-up SVG2 spec

Hello,

currently SVG 1.1 explicitly defines, which CSS properties apply to SVG 1.1 
documents (implicating as well, which do not apply, what helps authors to use
the same style sheet for (X)HTML documents and SVG documents and mixed
documents SVG+XHTML).
And it explicitly defines, if such CSS properties have values, that do not 
apply in the same way to SVG content and what to do, if they are noted 
anyway.
Even more, in SVG it is possible to use most applicable properties as 
presentation attributes (not available in CSS at all).

Therefore there is an obvious need to mention all this in SVG 2 as well.

Additionally one has to take care, that for CSS properties not applicable
for SVG 1.1 or with a different definition (for example in CSS 2.1 or a CSS 3 
modul different to CSS 2.0, applicable now), that there do not appear 
backwards incompatibilities due to changes in CSS, therefore one can
expect that the SVG 2 draft contains text to describe different behaviour
to avoid backwards  incompatibilities introduced by changes in CSS
(what might be of some use for CSS alone).

Obviously one can reduce definition text for unproblematic issues, 
but to remove everything without care, results in a loss of those information
already available about specific behaviour in SVG.

For readers of the draft/recommendation it is obviously a big help to
get at least a complete lost and some none normative description of all
applicable properties without the need to download any CSS recommendations 
or drafts as well and in case of offline-reading searching definitions 
manually, because links do not work anymore.
Indeed, if the SVG 2 recommendation is splitted into hundreds of different
recommendations, this results in the problem, that one can forget about
offline-reading. 

And if there is more than just 'one' SVG 2 it is even more problematic
for authors to predict, at which time one really can use SVG 2, because
it can be assumed to be completely specified and defined at this time
(for many authors it would be even more relevant to know, at which time
a recommendation is really implemented as specified, but we already learned
from HTML, SVG, CSS, that this does not happen in practice anyway ;o)

Olaf

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2014 11:01:21 UTC