Hi, I have been silent on this list for a while now because the pressures of work have not allowed me the time to participate. I have, therefore, probably missed some insightful dicussions on the topic I raise here, so feel free to refer me if I am restating questions that have already been answered. I also apologise in adance for my verbose posting...
I have had a look at XForms in a standalone SVG 1.2 doc and finally got a simple test to work, the problem I face is that the rendering of the XForms components in a standalone SVG is controlled via SVG elements, ie you have to build the SVG equivalent of the "input box" and then use the new "editable" attribute on the text element to allow a user to modify the text and then in turn modify the XForms component via a prototype binding and JS. This would all be great if the editable Text functionality worked the same way as text in a traditional input box, but the user must click on the text to start editing, ie to focus the keyboard events on the text, they can't just set the focus on the text via a javascript event fired when the "box" is clicked or the user does something fires a focus call (as far as I can tell) and then start typing (if I could use js then I could use an event on the input box rectangle that causes the text to be in keyboard focus... or is this already possible?). In addition once editing the text the user still has the problem that highlighting a portion of the text and then pressing delete or backspace does not delete the selected text, only a single character at the location of the text cursor...perhaps it is the ASV6 that has not implemented editable text to full extent... These are similar problems to ones I faced in the old Straley Forms input box (a difference is that the capslock works for the SVG 1.2 editable text version in ASV6 and many other similar problems that I set about trying to solve and got daunted). I dunno, I just feel like I am fighting an uphill battle and all my research indicates that for the past two years everyone has been waiting for UI components in a standalone SVG and they have not been delivered...frustrating. Some say that SVG is not the domain for UI elements as standalone web apps, but I disagree, I think it is perfect and except for the UI component issues I have managed to do some great stuff using just Javascript objects and SVG... I see a light at the end of the tunnel but I need to reach the end now, I want all the functionality of SVG, XForms, XBL (RCC) and CDF now and for it to have full browser support, I feel like thowing a tantrum ;-), if only that would speed things up, alas I know I am just joining a queue of many more expeienced developers that have probably put their SVG projects into ASP.NET or JSF or XHTML or whatever... I like standalone SVG that makes use of XForms, XBL etc when it needs it. So where to from here? well, I managed to get XForms to render amongst SVG via the FormsPlayer in an XHTML doc, should I take my standalone SVG app and write it as inline SVG within the XHTML doc? and in so doing allow the XForms renderer (FormsPlayer) to handle complexities of the keyboard interaction. Alternatively I could quite easily use a spawned window to hold the input boxes and these could then interact with the parent SVG to allow the user to edit attributes. This would then get my project back on track and I could deal with SVG text input boxes once the technology has matured. Either way I feel like there are all these options and I dunno which path to follow. Should I just ditch SVG and start from scratch building my app in Flash? tempting. Some guidance would be much appreciated, I have spent precious time trying to battle the draft spec/pre release/beta versions of things, I am ready to move back into existing technology and leave the battle until I have better tools/implementaions/standards for the job. Don't get me wrong though, I appreciate all the efforts on the W3C and am trying to support their standards (admittedly within the my self defined scope of a using standalone SVG docs), I am just beginning to loose faith. All advice or criticism will be gratefully received. Steve (GIS Developer specialising in internet mapping systems) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
