On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 18:12 +0200, Jasper van de Gronde wrote:
I understand where you're coming from, but to me it doesn't feel quite right yet. What if standardization of SVG 2.0 takes another N years? We would then perhaps have several (advanced!) features in the code base that hardly ever get used (because you have to turn them on explicitly). Naturally this would come with all the usual maintenance nightmares of "dead" code. If you don't use it, you don't notice it's broken. And if people do use it a lot the whole point is gone.
We don't properly support SVG versions yet as is. If we get that part straightened out, there would be nothing wrong with having "SVG 2.0 proposed" available (in conjunction w/ svg:switch) so we could then enable these advanced features without any flag. No problems with visibility and use then. :) We also need to remember that even if stuff is enabled by default it can still suffer the fate of lack of maintenance. The gradient editing dialog and the custom win32 dialogs come to mind.
Basically we WANT people to use this (and other) new feature(s), and perhaps even especially before they are standardized. But you're right we also do NOT want to run into trouble down the road when the standard is finalized. For now I hope some common sense, fallbacks and a lot of communication will help mitigate these problems, but I'd welcome any suggestions to further improve the situation.
Yes, we do want people to use new features. I myself want to use them. :) I think that if we have things implemented in a sane way to get non-finalized features in (especially taking into account that there is no proposed syntax for a lot of these things yet even), that we can possibly help to ensure that the features DO get added to the spec.
Please don't mistake where I'm coming from... I want the best vector graphics editor out there. However, given that Inkscape is our choice of editors and is explicitly an SVG editor, it means we have to actively work with the SVG WG to make the best vector graphics format out there.
Cheers, Josh