Accessible chart and diagrams -- declarative topology (was SVG 2 review request)

Hi Rich,

Following the lead of Doug and Amelia and putting this in a new thread since
I think it is probably beyond the scope of a feature review for SVG2, there
has been some discussion (there really has, I'm not making this up!) here
for several years about SVG "connectors"[1] that would have some graph
theoretic properties. I think it is safe to say that it won't be a part of
SVG2. On the other hand, there did seem to be some support and there was a
good deal of discussion, since I was even present for some of it.

I would hope that SVG2's approval moves along fairly smoothly (despite what
I think are some steps backward from SVG 1.1 and particularly from SVG1.2).
I also hope that input from the community of users of SVG will be weighed
heavily, in what I hope will be new work on SVG3. SVG 2 seems (to this
"outsider") to have been a period of hunkering down and reinventing things
so that HTML can have access all the good things that SVG has brought to the
numerous and diverse visualization communities.

SVG's inability to deal with connectivity (in maps, diagrams, traffic flow
and topological constructs) has been the subject of many presentations by
the community of practicing SVG users for many years at SVG Open and The
Graphical Web. The persistent "superpath" proposals that have emerged since
SVG1.2 point to a continued interest from users in such things. Dr.
Moissinac's presentations [2,3] on the topic have reminded us of how much
some of that work looks like topology, but then much of Tav [4] and Nikos'
[5] work on advanced gradients has a strongly topological flavor as well
(orientation and alignment of directionality on surfaces).

I've been working on a "theory of flow and drawing" that depicts such things
as weave, underpasses, relationships, knots, visual paradox, and
directionality things that are currently difficult to accomplish with SVG.
I have quite a corpus of material I've developed toward that end and am
hoping to have it in some sort of presentable state by November.  I'm
encouraged by the existence of concise notations for certain combinatorial
structures like Venn diagrams, knots, tangles, and polyominoes. I think a
declarative notation, such as you've advanced, can be brought to bear on
problems that are fundamentally more topological and graph theoretic than
strictly 2D and geometric. The level of abstraction and semantics would be
higher. 

I don't know if the W3C or the SVG WG is able to entertain such development
of "declarative topology" or not. 

Cheers
David

[1] http://tavmjong.free.fr/SVG/CONNECTORS/index.xhtml
[2] http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~concolat/SuperPathSVGOpen.pdf
[3] http://graphicalweb.org/2015/#presentation_33
[4] https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/shapes.html#MeshElement 
[5] http://graphicalweb.org/2015/#presentation_18



-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Morin [mailto:rdm@cfcl.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2016 4:16 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Cc: www-svg
Subject: Re: SVG 2 review request

Following up on my speculation about ways to make SVG-encoded charts and
diagrams accessible, I created this wiki page:

  http://wiki.cfcl.com/Projects/AxAp/Graphs

Comments and suggestions welcome.

-r

-- 
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm           Rich Morin           rdm@cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume    San Bruno, CA, USA   +1 650-873-7841

Software system design, development, and documentation

Received on Wednesday, 17 August 2016 17:36:51 UTC