Reuse of existing standards

In looking through some of the work Ecma has done to identify in a clear way how existing standards are leveraged, I found the blog post from Jesper Lund Stocholm about the use of SVG within ODF to be very interesting. This is an example of how difficult it can be to get cross-application interoperability when you have a specification that is vague. I think this is an obvious area where things could be improved (both in terms of the spec, as well as the implementations who try to follow the spec). https://www.idippedut.dk/post/2008/01/Embrace-and-extend---SVG-revisited.aspx

For those of you interested in the technical details, it is a great read. Also some good discussion down in the comments:

January 20. 2008 20:59

In the ODF schema, there are 9 elements in the SVG-compatible
namespace. They are as follows:

svg:desc,
svg:font-face-src,
svg:font-face-uri,
svg:font-face-format,
svg:font-face-name,
svg:definition-src,
svg:linearGradient,
svg:radialGradient, and
svg:stop.

Where are the basic primitives of SVG such as rect, circle, ellipse, line, polyline, and polygon? They do not exist in
the SVG-compatible namespace. Something similar to them
appear in the draw namespace, which is specific to ODF.

Anon

January 21. 2008 03:08

Anon, thanks for your reply,

Where are the basic primitives of SVG such as rect, circle, ellipse, line, polyline, and polygon? They do not exist in
the SVG-compatible namespace.

Yes - well that really emphasizes my point. ODF both augments and limits SVG and vector graphics are, at the end of the day, not handled by SVG but by ODF Draw.

jlundstocholm

-Brian