

Re: [SVG] Experiment and proposal

From: Fred P. <fprog26@hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 18:55:04 -0400
To: leonardr@lazerware.com, www-svg@w3.org
Message-ID: <BAY2-F45IDy3EmNKYyW00013b0e@hotmail.com>

>>>tables are certainly not the sort of priority
>>>where early versions of SVG need it.
>>Well, I don't think that including XHTML DTD of table inside SVG 1.2 could 
>>be considered difficult in any sort of way.
>>Why making it so difficult to display text and images that scales?
>It's not the DISPLAY of the text/tables, but the LAYOUT of them!   >Layout 
>of tables, esp. those that support all of the features of XHTML is quite 
>complex, and that belongs to the XHTML formatter.   There is already a way 
>for SVG to "drop out" to other XML renders, which is the correct way to 
>handle this.

What do you mean by "drop out", please provide code samples
or links or something proving your point, because I don't
understand what you mean here.

Anyway, how do you handle displaying something that mix
XHTML/SVG a LOT in a non easy way. For instance,
think of something like an applet, where text and images
can be moved around freely. Currently, this would mean
that alot of SVG and XHTML and DHTML and JavaScript
would have to be used in a very complicated way to provide
text layout and graphics layout in a moveable PDF fashion.

I mean if you gonna write a SVG viewer engine, then you probably
have the skills to write a proper XHTML layout engine at the same time.
Up to my knowledge, most people will rely
on Adobe SVG viewer (Netscape/IE), Apache Batik or similar.

So why complicate things with <text> stuff and equivalent when
a 'normal' user could simply use <table> tags instead as usual ?

<svg height="800" width="800">
<table border="1px" height="100" width="100" x="20" y="10">
<tr><td><use xlink:href="#icon"><text>blablabla</text></td></tr>
<tr><td><use xlink:href="#icon"><text>xyz</text></td></tr>

I mean having to calculate the height, width, spacing
manually for each line of a paragraph is kind of overkill.
Not to mention having simple stuff like
<center> or "text-align: center;"

Not to mention that having flexible table makes the SVG image
"flexible" in height-width and size, therefore making it more scalable.

Basically, I want to have LAYOUT FLEXIBILITY inside SVG itself =)
- Zoom in/out
- Resize
- Move
- Drag and drop

Just look at my simple UML diagram.
It is very difficult to have a list of function or attributes
with images followed by text followed by images
in an order list fashion. Then having this entire thing
as a single <g id="Component"> object that can be referenced easily,
compared to its DHTML counterpart.

Now, if I have to this in DHTML,
I would have some pretty fancy thing
going on just to draw the arrows dynamically,
where it would be very simple in SVG or GD library.

>>One of the advantage of PDF is that you can ZOOM IN and still
>>see beautiful images and text. Why not having a SVG document
>>that can do something completely similar ?
>         SVG and PDF are equivalent when it comes to support of text.  PDF, 
>like SVG, has no concept of words, lines, paragraphs, tables, etc.  It's 
>just a series of drawing instructions about where to place the glyphs on 
>the page.  Something earlier in the process (the authoring application) 
>defines where they go - the LAYOUT engine.

You really wish to make people life harder right?
Have easy-to-use scalable graphics,
but if you use enough text in there, you better be maso? =P

>>Because currently, there's no way around to do it efficiently.
>>Since there's no concept of a JAR file equivalent,
>>if you wish to send someone a SVG standalone document
>>containing few bitmap images, how do you proceed?
>         You can embed bitmaps just fine in SVG using CDATA sections.  
>Adobe Illustrator (and other SVG authoring apps)
>give you that option.

I don't have Adobe Illustrator, so I dunno about it.
Provide a link or code sample showing this,
I really want to see how this is done.


Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2003 18:55:11 GMT
