Comments on: SVG News Digest: 2008-04-16

By: Jeff Schiller

Jeff Schiller — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:05:44 +0000

@Doug: I was going to make a similar proposal (except I wouldn’t limit the markup export as XML to SVG, as I’m sure you didn’t intend to do).

By: schepers

schepers — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:35:24 +0000

I think that UI requirements can be stated as conditionally normative statements, such as, “User Agents which allow copy/paste or which allow the user to view the source must provide a way to export any SVG fragment as a namespace-well-formed XML fragment.” This does not completely allay my concerns regarding the proposal, but it’s an example of how we can better lead the way to a more interoperable “ecosystem” of UAs that implement open Web standards.

Toolchain issues like this, which provide intuitive and simple functionality for end users, are crucial for Web apps to be competitive to (and compatible with) OS-level apps. I would love to know that I could copy some SVG from a site, and it would paste as a raster into Paint, as vector graphics in Inkscape, and as markup in TextMate. This is something Chaals and I have working on in the Clipboard Operations spec. (Similarly, MathML clips could paste as mathematical entities and operators in a calculator, and as plain text or markup elsewhere.)

By: Jeff Schiller

Jeff Schiller — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:28:40 +0000

Thanks, Ian for the clarity, I’ve updated my post.

By: Ian Hickson

Ian Hickson — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:57:58 +0000

You wrote: “it could not be a requirement because User Agent requirements are out of scope of the HTML5 specification”.

To clarify — it’s _user interface_ requirements (UI requirements) that are out of scope. They are out of scope because we have no idea what effect they may have. For example, it would make no sense to ask the browser on an iPod Touch to have a feature that let you copy out the XML version of the DOM — the OS has no “paste” functionality.

The spec does strongly encourage that such a UI be made available though (and indeed that encouragement is still there, even after we removed the SVG-in-text/html text, because even in XHTML, inline SVG might not be easily copy-and-paste-able from the source without such a feature).

HTH.