SVG and styles [was: Open Office XML Format and SVG]

[Daniel Vogelheim <Daniel.Vogelheim@sun.com>]

Hello,

in today's meeting we discussed graphical content and SVG again. It was 
suggested that during SVG specifications no single style model was found 
agreeable, and thus SVG has a kind of 'open' style model, so that using 
SVG within our existing style inheritance framework may be possible. 
I've got an action item to look into this:

As said during the phone call, SVG supports 'direct' attributes (style 
property attributes attached to svg elements) and styling through CSS2 
stylesheets. XSLT is supposed to generate 'direct' attributes.

I couldn't really make sense of the spec with regard to alternate style 
models. One the one hand, I didn't find any language in the spec that 
would suggest a third or 'open' style model. On the other hand, it 
contains a number of references like "style sheet language such as CSS", 
which apparently means that alternate style sheets could be applied as 
well. However, all styling choices mentioned or used are either style 
attributes or CSS. It looks a bit like the editors have deliberately 
been trying to be vague on the subject.

Anyway, my interpretation is that SVG is indeed intended to use either 
CSS or SVG style attributes. Using it with our style concept would thus 
be a stretch of the specification, but one that fits into the 
extending-is-acceptable approach we are discussing.


Btw, for more on SVG styling, see: http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/styling.html


Sincerely,
Daniel