On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 08:19, Carl Worth wrote:
If you want dynamic HTML (by which I assume you mean DOM), my feeling is you'll need to do something similar to what Sodipodi and Inkscape do: we have a pre-chewed "semantic" layer a bit like librsvg's, and then a raw XML/CSS abstract syntax tree underneath it, with protocols for synchronizing changes between the two.
These synchronization issues don't sound like much fun. I can imagine that if you care about round-tripping the XML or something that you would need the dual representations. But for a "simple" dynamic SVG viewer I can't see why we would want two trees.
If "simple" includes DOM, then it's unavoidable on that front -- at the limit, a DOM implementation would be used for the AST, though I think DOM is a rather painful API to implement SVG rendering on top of.
The synchronization issues are indeed not fun, but that's largely because nobody has stepped back and devised a consistent approach to it yet.
-mental