[whatwg] Including HTML more directly into SVG

Tue Sep 11 01:32:53 PDT 2012

On 11/09/2012 10:15 , Elliott Sprehn wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This would be a lot easier if I could somehow invoke the CSS box model
>> inside of SVG, ...
>
> This tightly binds the list of element names in SVG to HTML

Which isn't that big of a problem. It's a simple matter of staying in 
sync with the SVG WG, which isn't so hard.

> and also
> breaks assumptions inside SVG DOM that HTML5 may depend upon. Indeed
> SVG already has elements like <title>, <a> and <style>.

Which is breakage worth looking into. In SVG 2, I think it would make 
sense to just align <a> and <style> on HTML (and a few others). <title> 
is somewhat different, but it's not as if it couldn't be handled in 
Tab's model.

It's hard to use SVG without bumping into the sort of issue that Tab 
describes. And foreignObject was always unpleasant. Welding SVG and HTML 
more tightly makes a lot of sense, if we can do it with minimal change 
we should.

> It would be really unfortunate if the SVG folks were prevented from
> using logical names like <content> or <section> because we parse them
> into HTML.

I don't think that the SVG WG wants to create new element names that 
conflict with HTML. In fact, last I looked they were even talking about 
dropping the namespace.

> SVG has a totally different font and styling model, different kinds of
> animations, filters, etc. The paragraph and span concept in SVG
> wouldn't be the same thing so it's not an antipattern. You would have
> to specify some kind of x/y coordinate and the width since SVG doesn't
> have a flow concept so there would be nothing to size or place
> against.

That's precisely what Tab's proposal fixes.

> You'd also have problems like losing access to the <font>'s you
> defined in the SVG world in the embedded HTML world.

No, you wouldn't, there's no reason they can't be shared.

> Might be nice to add an <html> element with x/y width/height
> attributes to make <foreignObject> easier though!

I'm not sure how that would help. However, <foreignObject size=auto> 
would do the trick IMHO (I'm concerned that making it more automatic 
might have nasty corner cases). We could even make a new, less horrible 
name for it, like <css>.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon