Tag: html

SVG and XHTML are a missed opportunity

too bad really that SVG has to suck so hard

After a couple days of working with SVG, I have the feeling that nobody on the SVG working group gave any thought to how vector graphics could make interactive web GUIs better. It seems they were more concerned with lions, and tigers, and bars (oh my). In other words, SVG was designed to be primarily an image file format; a vector alternative to PNGs and JPGs.

That’s a shame, because SVG could be perfect as a means of escaping the rectangular tyranny of HTML and CSS. Think of the fun of being able to tilt photographs, fill text with gradients, or create circular buttons. Unfortunately, if you try to achieve these effects using SVG and XHTML together, you won’t be having any fun. You will be too busy doing geometry calculations by hand (which the SVG engine should be doing for you).

Evil markup

i just finished a conversion of a MT blog to KAYWA. Most of the posts were stored in some non-xhtml markup (yes i’m talking about you, textile) which made the task really really tedious. while i can appreciate alternative markup for data entry purposes (think wikis), i have, after this experience especially, no patience for storing markup that is not in the normal form, read, in either XHTML or another widely used XML format.
as bill de hora points out, the advantages of syntax (and increasingly, content) virtual machines are just too great. And the case for non-standard markup gets weaker every day. If there ever was one.

Tag soup is not healthy

Let’s have a look at one other bit of the markup:
…&lt:/p&gt:
&lt:p class=MsoNormalgt;&lt:![if !supportEmptyParas]&gt: &lt:![endif]&gt:&lt:o:p&gt:&lt:/o:p&gt:&lt:/p&gt:
&lt:p class=”MsoNormal”&gt:…
Say what? Let’s ignore the utter invalidity of this line for one minute and focus on what it is trying to do… Increase the margin of the surrounding paragraphs. I think I can see the reasoning behind this (it almost certainly involved someone in a meeting one day saying “roundtripping is more important than cleanliness”) but still, it should have been replaced by simply placing class “thematic-break” on the following element and then adding the following style rule, surely:
.thematic-break { margin-top: 2em; }

and yet, there are people dreaming about the PSVI. a slap in the face as i actually said to eric today, i wonder when we can cut back on the regexp in our daily chores.