RE: Rectangle height and width

Fwiw, I kinda like the use case. It makes sense to me. (which sometimes proves to be a mark of doom for suggestions SVG, so apologies if my weighing in jinxes the idea.)

I would concur that "there are probably other places in the spec where negative values are unnecessarily restricted."

I remember back around 2008 strolling through Nuremberg with Eric Dahlstrom and complaining that this example:
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/newstuff/textpath1.svg didn't work as I thought it should, because the value of startoffset on a textPath was confined to being non-negative. He replied that no one had quite imagined doing that particular thing, but that it made sense. Within a few years this example ran in all browsers (this was pre-IE-SVG, so one used the Adobe plugin). 

Cheers
David

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Pemberton [mailto:steven.pemberton@cwi.nl] 
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2018 7:43 AM
To: www-svg@w3.org
Subject: Rectangle height and width

https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/shapes.html#RectElement

"The width and height properties define the overall width and height of  
the rectangle. A negative value for either property is illegal and must be  
ignored as a parsing error."

Please please please fix this! There is absolutely no abstract  
justification for saying a rectangle cannot have a negative height (or  
width). It's just the same dimension in the other direction!

If you're interested in a very natural use case, please see
https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/xforms/histogram.html

(There are probably other places in the spec where negative values are  
unnecessarily restricted, but this is the one that I ran into in the above  
example).

Best wishes,

Steven Pemberton
CWI, Amsterdam

Received on Saturday, 9 June 2018 14:20:46 UTC