Re: ISSUE-2147 (external-refs confusing): Section on externally referenced documents confusing [Last Call: SVG 1.2 Tiny]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:28:36 +0100, Cyril Concolato <cyril.concolato@enst.fr> wrote:

>
> Hi Cameron,
>
> Thank you for your editing. This is indeed a lot better than before. I just have two comments. See below.
...
>>   14.1.6 Processing of external references to documents
>>
>>   When an SVG user agent resolves an external reference to a document,
>>   how the document is loaded and processed depends on how the document
>>   was referenced. As defined below, a document is classified as either
>>   a primary document or a resource document, and this classification
>>   determines the document's processing with respect to loading of
>>   external references.
>>
>>   A primary document is one that is to be presented in whole by the user
>>   agent. Specifically, the following are classified as primary
>>   documents:
>>
>>    * An entire document, be it an SVG stand-alone document or some other
>>      document that can contain SVG document fragments, that is loaded
>>      into a user agent for presentation, such as when navigating a web
>>      browser to an IRI, whether by typing the IRI into the browser's
>>      address bar, clicking on a link to that IRI, or having the
>>      Location::assign() method invoked. (In an HTML 5 user agent, this
>>      is when a document is part of a top-level browsing context
>>      ([HTML5], section 4.1.1).)
>>
>>    * An entire SVG document that is loaded due to it being referenced by
>>      an 'animation' element.
>>
>>    * A document that is loaded due to it being referenced for inclusion
>>      by a parent non-SVG document for presentation, such as using the
>>      HTML 'object' or 'iframe' elements.
>>
>>   A resource document is a document that has been loaded because it is
>>   referenced as a resource by an SVG document fragment.
> It should say here "because parts of it are referenced as resources" as opposed to "presented in whole" in the above definition. Similar wording would be good as well.

Could you clarify?

You want to change:
"A resource document is a document that has been loaded because it is referenced as a resource by an SVG document fragment."

to:
"A resource document is a document that has been loaded because parts of it are referenced as a resource by an SVG document fragment."

Correct? I would agree with such a rewording, since resources are always parts of a document.

However, replacing "presented in whole" with "because parts of it are referenced as resources" doesn't produce a sentence that makes sense to me.

...
>>   References to any other kinds of document, such as media or external
>>   scripts, are not classified as primary or resource documents. Multiple
>>   references to media at a particular IRI always result in separate
>>   timelines being created.
> This last part is also fine but you have a sentence explaining the behavior for media. You should explicitely say what happens for script. It may use a reference to HTML if you think it's better.

I don't think this section is appropriate for such definitions. We have a scripting chapter, which we could link to. Does section 15.2.1 "Script Processing" not describe the processing well enough? I think it's rather clear from that section that if you have two separate script elements they will execute once each, even if the referenced script is the same IRI (and I can't help but wonder if this is really such a large issue, since IMHO it doesn't provide an author much value in running the same script snippet twice anyway). I'd guess that if you find this type of content then it's most likely an authoring mistake.

Finally I'd like to add that I'm satisfied with the wording Cameron put into the spec, it does address my concerns about the inline svg fragments, and is definitely more clear than what was there before.

Cheers
/Erik

-- 
Erik Dahlstrom, Core Technology Developer, Opera Software
Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
Personal blog: http://my.opera.com/macdev_ed

Received on Friday, 31 October 2008 09:07:42 UTC