It feels like ... [was RE: Alternatives to altGlyph for non-SVG fonts]

In response to talk about how to support altGlyph, Cameron McCormack wrote:

-------------
I don't know that CSS is the right level to support this.  Still, I could see a couple of places where you could make this work:

   tspan.symbols { content: glyph(123) glyph(456); }

Or perhaps a way to augment the cmap that comes from the font, so that you can then reference the glyphs by Unicode character.  Something like:

   @font-face {
     font-family: My Font;
     src: url(...);
     glyphs: U+E000-E007 1234, U+E008 2345;
   }

which would map glyphs 1234-1241 to Unicode characters U+E000 to U+E007 and glyph 2345 to character U+E008.

Still, it feels more like something that should be in the content of the document.
--------------

Hi Cameron, all,
There are a growing number of things being done in CSS instead of in SVG that *feel* wrong to me. Let me explain.

On Friday I was giving my standard semesterly lecture about why SVG is good [1].
A part of why it is good (from my perspective) is SMIL [2], so I was getting into my reasons that SMIL is good [3,4]. I was reminded again of point number 14 in [4]:

14. behavior resides with the thing that is behaving (improved semantics and accessibility)

That is one of the main reasons why I am uncomfortable with moving SVG functionality from SVG to CSS. Yeah, I get it that it is good to have HTML able to do cool animated things. I argued for exactly that in 2007-08 when cooperation between WHATWG and W3C had just begun on the development of the HTML5 spec [5,6]. (There are more mentions in March 2007 but that month is currently missing from the archive.)

On the other hand, there are fundamental differences in what hTml and svG (emphasis on T and G) seek to do. In a textual world, animation may be *only* presentation. In a graphical world it can be an intrinsic part of the essence of the thing!

An acrobat, a dancer or juggler, a flood, a tornado or a wave, a firefly, even a butterfly or some emoji has its meaning inextricably bound with its temporal behavior. It is not one of many things that inherit its choreography from some abstract style defined elsewhere. Semantically, the behavior of an object in SVG belongs with the object! I'm not one to ever file a formal objection, not really knowing how or wanting to be that disruptive, but should any browser ever be allowed to claim standards compliance with SVG2.0 then SVG2.0 is simply broken and we should start work on SVG5!

Cheers and regards (and the expected bit of hyperbole -- how else would you know it is really me?)

Altglyphs? Well, not sure about that, but the proposal from Mozilla to handle fonts in SVG, as presented by Cameron at last month's Graphical Web seemed to address my concerns about the decision to remove SVG fonts from the spec. The competing proposals seemed rather inadequate by comparison.  It was the notion of "where things belong" that triggered this response about how things feel.

David


[1] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/Guangzhou/Overview.htm 
[2] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/2011/SMIL.html
[3] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/2011/explanations.html
[4] http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/2011/good.html 
[5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0460.html 
[6] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Jan/0292.html

Received on Sunday, 28 September 2014 13:27:09 UTC