Re: Rename 'd' property

Doug Schepers:
> Hi, folks–
> 
> I'm supportive of renaming it as a property.
>
> I'd suggest 'path-data', to give it the clarity of context.
> 
> There is no issue of backwards compatibility; the option of setting the
> path data via CSS doesn't exist in any current or previous version of
> SVG, so there's nothing to be incompatible with. 

Sure, this would be no problem to chose an arbitrary name for some property.
I got the impression, that the idea was to provide an alternative name for the
attribute as well - implicating the complication, what happens, if an author
notes both names with different values and so on.

> There is the issue of
> name correspondence between the attribute and property, for the sake of
> the author; if aliasing is allowed in CSS today, then we could have both
> 'd' and 'path-data' (or whatever).

Yes, this is remaining, it can be slightly confusing for authors to have a 
different property name than attribute name, if used at all.
Because it seems to be intended to use the property not only for data
of a path attribute in CSS, 'path-data' could be surprising for other use
cases as well. However, the content should be always data about a path
for whatever purpose, this name would be suggestive.


> 
> The issue of style-vs-content is largely irrelevant, since there's no
> software that makes a distinction; the most pressing issue there is not
> the semantics, but the ease and consistency of API access to the path
> data, regardless of where it's defined, and the consistency of
> bounding-box results.

Due to the typically low implementation quality of current viewers, I do not 
worry much about how they present documents now.
Maybe they do  the best they can.
It is more relevant, how it is noted in documents, because in ten or hundred
years there will be other viewers, but some documents may remain and
if we assume, that our current digital episode of mankind has some cultural
relevance, it is quite important to have meaningful documents for the future,
not just tag soup and an arbitrary mix of decoration and maybe content, maybe 
bugs.
If formats like SVG or XHTML are borked today, this has longer consequences 
for the future. Poor quality of current viewers do not have such big 
consequences, because they change much faster than content.


Olaf

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2016 09:43:23 UTC