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Again, em's don't solve the problem of having to guess and check across the results of every rendering system. There are plenty of cases where I want text to be

Again, em's don't solve the problem of having to guess and check across the results of every rendering system. There are plenty of cases where I want text to be written between two vertical lines without overlapping either of them.

danShumway 6y ago
> There are plenty of cases where I want text to be written between two vertical lines without overlapping either of them. Which is a problem in svg only because you can't space those vertical lines using `em` units. I'm not only talking about text, SVG is terrible for responsive design in general even for charts/diagrams that contain no text at all. The entire spec is locked into a world where everything is going to be a fixed aspect ratio that never changes, where zooming in should zoom everything including both text and border widths, where the idea of spacing elements responsively but not having the elements get bigger as the viewport resizes is impossible -- which just isn't an accurate representation of how modern SVG diagrams are used outside of PDFs. You have basically two options for responsive design[0] -- viewport units (which are terrible because many SVG engines and browsers don't have the ability to avoid applying viewport scaling to path widths), and percentages (which are flat-out unusable in paths). Don't even get me started on that, there's zero reason for paths not to have the ability to specify points using percentages. Heck, I should be able to specify paths using a mixture of viewport units and percentages in the same path. But whatever, at this point the rant getting off topic. The point is, we're not talking about setting font using `em` and every other part of the SVG in viewport units. You should have access to `em` everywhere, including when positioning other elements and drawing paths. [0] Okay, 3 if you do a bunch of hotlinking and embedding and nested viewports and garbage that nobody should have to think about.

danShumway 6y ago

> There are plenty of cases where I want text to be written between two vertical lines without overlapping either of them. Which is a problem in svg only because you can't space those vertical lines using `em` units. I'm not only talking about text, SVG is terrible for responsive design in general even for charts/diagrams that contain no text at all. The entire spec is locked into a world where everything is going to be a fixed aspect ratio that never changes, where zooming in should zoom everything including both text and border widths, where the idea of spacing elements responsively but not having the elements get bigger as the viewport resizes is impossible -- which just isn't an accurate representation of how modern SVG diagrams are used outside of PDFs. You have basically two options for responsive design[0] -- viewport units (which are terrible because many SVG engines and browsers don't have the ability to avoid applying viewport scaling to path widths), and percentages (which are flat-out unusable in paths). Don't even get me started on that, there's zero reason for paths not to have the ability to specify points using percentages. Heck, I should be able to specify paths using a mixture of viewport units and percentages in the same path. But whatever, at this point the rant getting off topic. The point is, we're not talking about setting font using `em` and every other part of the SVG in viewport units. You should have access to `em` everywhere, including when positioning other elements and drawing paths. [0] Okay, 3 if you do a bunch of hotlinking and embedding and nested viewports and garbage that nobody should have to think about.