September 1, 2004

SVG+XBL: Now, that's cool

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-sXBL-20040901/

Thank you, Ian Hickson. Thank you, David Hyatt. And also Jon Ferraiolo. I haven't read past the first example, that of inline XBL, and I like it already.

Posted by WeirdAl at September 1, 2004 11:53 PM
Comments

It is a well written document and sXBL looks good but there are some features that XBL2 has that I know are crucial to Mozilla.

sXBL has no inheritance
sXBl has no attachment through CSS
sXBL has no attribute forwarding

sXBl on the other hand has attachment based on local name and name space. That is something that is seriously limiting XBL1 because bindings are not applied directly when doing createElementNS.

XBL2 has some really neat features like the CSS pseudo class interaction and better control of inheritance insertion points.

For XBL2 see http://www.hixie.ch/specs/xbl/XBL2.html

Posted by: Erik Arvidsson at September 2, 2004 1:50 AM

What's the difference between a URL and a LINK?

Posted by: alex at September 2, 2004 1:58 AM

Why is the SVG group redesigning every spec they find interesting? When the hell are they going to give us a simple light-weight spec for vector graphics?

Posted by: hemebond at September 2, 2004 2:44 PM

The SVG WG gave you a spec for vector graphics in 1.1, now they're responding to the requests for the other parts, particularly meeting the needs Application UI developers who have requested the ability.

A CSS binding isn't relevant to SVG (CSS is optional in viewers and pretty unpopular in SVG amoung authors, rendering languages on top of a rendering language is a pain) So I don't think that is a big problem. Attribute forwarding is trivial to do in script, so I think it's sensible to leave this open if there are disagreements on how it should be implemented, and inheritance - well that's clearly a complicated thing that would just delay deployment. A good idea to keep it simple to get implementation feedback. (Yes there's Mozilla XBL, but that's one implementor only - one implementor giving feedback isn't great, you might be relying on a brilliant programmer in their team to say things are easy.)

The SVG WG's decision to move towards XBL so they didn't have to invent their own thing with similar functionality has already cost over 5 months to the SVG 1.2 specification it seems to me. RCC was advanced as sXBL is now, and had nothing technical against it. (it was just duplicating XBL functionality, rightly a bad thing, but perhaps not a suicidal thing.)

At least it's hear now, and hopefully the editors can concentrate on it rather than on other areas and get it finished quickly.

Jim.

Posted by: Jim Ley at September 4, 2004 3:33 PM