I wasn't sure whether to blog about this but I thought I might as well start a little conversation here first...
People are proposing all sorts of extensions to CSS for fancy presentational effects --- gradients, canvas backgrounds, masks, and so on. I think this is unwieldy and duplication of effort. Instead I'd just like the SVG CSS properties 'filter', 'mask', 'clip-path', and 'fill' to Just Work on non-SVG content --- making the full power of SVG paint servers and effects available to HTML content. And I'd like a way to specify any element as an 'image' source for CSS 'background' and other properties ... could be as simple as url(#element). The biggest problem with this is making the necessary SVG fragments available in an HTML document. Using HTML5's proposed parsing extensions, or just XHTML, you could including the SVG fragments in the underlying document, but that's clumsy if you're using the same stylesheet in many documents. A better approach would be to give the stylesheet an accompanying .svg file and use external references to that SVG file. So foo.css would contain "filter:url(foo.svg#bar)". That would work pretty well if we can load the file once per base document and resolve all references to foo.svg to that same loaded document. Unfortunately the spec http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/struct.html#URIReference doesn't say anything about this but perhaps that just means we can interpret it the way we want. An additional issue is that we'd like to be able to manipulate the contents of foo.svg using the DOM or declarative animation. So one random idea is to expose a DOM API, analogous to the CSSOM stylesheet API, that lets you get the contentDocument of all same-origin referenced content documents. Any thoughts? Rob _______________________________________________ dev-tech-layout mailing list dev-tech-layout@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-layout
