Comment by AndrewSwift | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewSwift | Hacker News Reader

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If you can be specific about what is broken in Firefox, I would be grateful.

I have tested it on both the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox and didn't see any bugs.

I did notice that Firefox isn't able to handle the animation as smoothly as Safari or Edge/Chrome.

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As far as PDF's, I actually thought about using PDF's, but:

- browsers don't display them at the right size (there's a big border around the edge in Safari, Chrome displays a toolbar and a left column, and Firefox displays it much smaller than the window size

- it's difficult to link between PDF's without special authoring tools

- it's a proprietary format

- the same page as PDF is a much bigger file than as SVG

- no reusable content: the same photo on two pages has to be reloade

- no visible source code (I consider this one of the most important principles of the web)

- no animation (a complete dealbreaker for any serious web content)

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As far as printing, you will be able to print Svija pages — it's one of our favorite features.

Right now, there's a conflict with the fact that we use the Display P3 color space that messes up the colors.

I turned that off, and if you go to https://svija.love/content and print the page at 40% you will see that it looks great. It's one of our main use cases — online documentation (for a camera for example) that can be printed and look the SAME as the web page.

Obviously, with animated elements that aren't in the correct position etc., it won't work well.

I'll turn the bright colors back on tomorrow, so after 16:00 GMT on November 10th, this will no longer work.

1. OK, it does seem to work in Firefox.

2. OK, I guess you can (almost) print it.

However:

3. PDF is not a proprietary format. It’s actually a real standard, ISO 32000.

4. You completely ignored my main point, which was about graceful fallback rendering and semantic markup. Honestly, All-SVG websites seems like the XSL Formatting Objects fiasco all over again.

It's true that I didn't answer your main point.

Our objective is to create a format that is sufficiently stable that it won't need a fallback solution.

SVG is incredibly consistant from machine to machine, much more so than HTML. Can you give me an example of a case where fallback would be necessary (leaving aside questions of accessibility)?

Semantic markup is an issue for search engines, but we are building websites for people to read.

Visitors to a website never see the tags. They have no idea if something is <h1> or <div> or <strong>.

Are you suggesting that semantic markup is important for people, or for Google? Is this purely an accessibility issue (I don't mean to diminish the importance, it's just a question)?

Our plan is to automatically create parallel content for accessibility requirements, including semantic information. Sort of like the <noscript> tag, an imaginary <nosvg> tag.

If you feel like I am missing the point of semantic markup, I would love to know why, (or you can just post a link).

The reason to use semantic markup is precisely because you don’t know what you want to do with the data after the fact. If you, for instance, make all quotes italic, and also emphasize words using italic, how would you later find all the quotes (maybe to verify their authenticity or create source links)? You can’t, since you have hidden the semantic meaning (emphasis or quote) behind a visual style (italic). Non-semantic markup loses information which you originally had when creating the document, and you might need that information later.

Of course, semantic markup is also turning out to be very important for accessibility reasons, since the things people are really needing from a document is its semantic content, and its visual style can be discarded if necessary.

> Our plan is to automatically create parallel content for accessibility requirements

I don’t know. “Separate but equal” seldom works out well.

Thanks for taking the time to answer, it means a lot to me.

I didn't know that PDF is a real standard — thank you.

You didn't reply to any of my reasons for why PDF would be unusable for web pages.

I don't mean to sound combative — I'm trying to learn as much as possible from the feedback on this page. It's a precious opportunity to let some fresh air into our project.

> You didn't reply to any of my reasons for why PDF would be unusable for web pages.

PDF is unsuitable for web pages for more or less the same reasons which SVG is unsuitable. The reasons you gave are also valid, but I deem them insignificant compared to that.

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