[Seaside] SVG design questions

[Lukas Renggli]

Hi Holger,

Gerhard is also interested working on that. So I suggest that you
collaborate ;-)

>  The first issue is the canvas. Subclassing the existing canvas seems to be
> a bad idea:
>  - SVG has an extensive set of tags. Combining this with the extensive set
> of HTML tags will end up in one large bulky mess
>  - the SVG anchor has the same tag as the HTML anchor, but requires the
> xlink namespace for the href attribute, so it requires a different anchor
> brush
>  - SVG and HTML cannot be freely mixed, so it's not necessary to combine the
> both in a single class.

I suggest that you create your own "namespace" that you can retrieve
from the html canvas. This would be an object that knows the
underlying rendering context, but only has the SVG relevant methods.

So that you can write:

   html svg line
      from: 1 @ 1;
      to: 100 @ 100

Or for embedded SVG rendering I imagine writing something like:

    html svg: [ html renderSvgOn: html svg ]

Where renderSvgOn: would look like:

    renderSvgOn: svg
       svg line
          from: 1 @ 1;
          to: 100 @ 100

>  Currently, I've subclassed WACanvas, not WARenderCanvas. Rendering inlined
> SVG will require switching the canvas. Currently I see no problems here, but
> maybe I'm wrong.

I think that's the way to go.

>  Another issue is inlining SVG vs. separate SVG documents. Quite often I've
> seen some caveats about inlining SVG (e.g. see
> http://wiki.svg.org/Inline_SVG). On the other hand, I see some disadvantages

I have no experience with that.

I think inlining seems simpler to start with. Have a look at the
#iframe brush to see how to create a specific document as part of the
page.

>  Embedding with <object>
>  -----------------------
>  I've tried to implement rendering of external SVG documents that are
> included as <object> in the HTML document, and kind of succeeded:
>
>  http://www.smallish.org:7777/seaside/SVG/example

Wow, that looks already very cool.

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch