Missing the point

Article:
SVG: A Sure Bet

Subject: Missing the point

Date: 2003-07-19 18:21:48

From: x emplify

Response to: Missing the point

Paul wrote: "Well, my presentation is available in SVG here:
http://www.blastradius.com/svgopen2003/
"

Unfortunately I could not view this using either the Corel viewer in Mozilla 1.4 in Windows XP or using the Java open-source Batik Squiggle SVG viewer.

I found the following errors:

1) At line 14973: equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)

My fix, change from:
while (gpage = doc.getElementById("Page_"+p)) {
to:
while (gpage == doc.getElementById("Page_"+p)) {

2) At line 5370, col 167: incomplete path element, and path element not allowed within tspan element

My fix, change from:
<path d="M180.343,153.481c0,27
to:


At this point the file would still not work in the the viewers due to more scripting related problems.

When I came across SVG three years ago, I too was very excited by the possiblities that it offered. I applaud Paul's efforts to promote SVG. However my inability to view this file highlights one of the problems SVG faces: generators and viewers that do not follow the SVG specification.

It seems that the SVG generator Paul used to produce his presentation produced non well-formed XML, invalid SVG and erroneous EcmaScript. Presumably some SVG viewer allows the file to be viewed dispite the mistakes, leading to the false belief that it is conformant SVG.

It is up to SVG developers to demand that implementors respect the SVG specfication, otherwise all the promise of interoperability is for nothing. In the mean time those producing SVG for the web should check their files for cross viewer compatibility.

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Missing the point
2003-07-22 17:42:14 Paul Prescod [Reply]

1) At line 14973: equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)

Actually this is legal ECMAscript.

At line 5370, col 167: incomplete path element

There is no path element there. There is some literal character data using the ampersand greater-than character but no XML parser should treat that as an element and no SVG viewer should either. Whichever viewer you were using that does this is making a mistake.

For now, the Adobe implementation is quite a bit ahead of the others in implementing advanced features of the spec.

Missing the point
2003-07-20 12:49:49 Paul Prescod [Reply]

Thanks for the report. I've forwarded it to the makers of the software. SVG developers should definately test with at least Adobe SVG and Batik.