xml-dev - RE: What is wrong with SVG?

[Jon Ferraiolo <jferraio@Adobe.COM>]

At 04:26 AM 3/7/00 -0800, Don Park wrote:
>Jon Ferraiolo wrote:
>>As I remember, we decided against a syntax with coordinates as 
>>character data because we wanted character data only for things
>>that were textual in nature (such as <text> elements).
>
>Now this is interesting.  Do you recall WHY the WG wanted to use
>character data only for things that were textual in nature?  I
>am not being critical here.  I just sense a gem of wisdom I do
>not yet have.  I am intrigued.

Don,

I am not sure whether there was a whole ton of deep thought on this issue.
As I remember, the "wisdom" was based on theories that:

1) By having character data only in <desc>, <title> and <text>, then really
dumb screen readers for the visually impaired which only vocalized
character data would tend to provide a more suitable aural rendering of an
SVG document, versus one attempted to vocalize all of the moveto, lineto,
curveto and coordinate data in a 'path' element

2) Similarly, web search engines which attempt to index generic XML files
would be able to index SVG files more efficiently. Again, they wouldn't
have to learn to skip over character data within SVG's 'path' element.

3) It just seemed cleaner to have the consistent rule that the only aspects
of SVG that are represented as character data are things that actually make
sense to read (when looking at source code) or vocalize.

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG Editor
Adobe Systems Incorporated

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