On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:41 PM, Dave Crossland <dave@...1555...> wrote:
To you, does having the autosmooth node type as part of the SVG spec makes sense?
With the reservation that I have no experience in standardization and so may overlook something, I'd say yes. It promises a significant gain for very little expense. You probably already have to specify how a node behaves when it is moved during animation - i.e. whether its control points stay or move with it. For autosmooth nodes, you just need to expand that description a bit, adding a new mode or option.
The only problem I see is that it would be very desirable to avoid extending the path grammar, for it is a really basic low-level part of SVG. Ideally, you should still use the same C command for autosmooth nodes as for regular Beziers, but identify those nodes that need autosmooth behavior through some separate attribute, similar to the nodetypes attribute in Inkscape.
Yes. (For clarification, by "nasty" curve I mean only visually, and specifically, one with 'kinks')
In that sense, on the one hand, Spiros are indeed nasty because kinky and capricious, but on the other hand, when well-behaved, they do look noticeably smoother and more "natural" than autosmoothed paths, due to the tricky Spiro math that minimizes curvature for a given set of points. Still, like I said, for many uses autosmoothed paths are good enough.