On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 19:57 +0100, john cliff wrote:
- I'm not suggesting we do something that's not valid svg.
I understand that it's valid SVG. But, it's against the spirit of a vectored format. I personally found it inadequate when I found out that Adobe Illustrator made gradient meshes into bitmaps in SVG. Not that it wasn't valid SVG, more that it was an unreasonable workaround.
What else are they meant to do with the gradient meshes? dump them? The format lacks the ability to define things users want, so a workaround is necessary.
I'm not sure what they could do with them. But, I know that Adobe has some very smart people there, I'd imagine the smart people weren't asked about it anymore once someone decided to dump it to bitmap. I think Bulia came up with an interesting way to represent it.
- Unless there's some serious speed increase in the way we render
blurs etc, we should probably avoid workarounds that introduce more
I'm not suggesting that *we* render it using a blur, I'm suggesting that we represent it in the SVG using a blur. Just like when drawing spirals we're not constantly editing the nodes, we're looking at the metadata, detecting it as a spiral, editing it as such, and then putting it back out as a path.
I'd rather use a workaround that looks the same as what we render, and the blur thing will be very hard to guarantee that with. So unless thats how we render them I dont think its a reasonable option.
We'll always end up with compatibility issues with everything like this. We have in the past with spirals and other shapes. We can't guarantee, but we can test and I think that Jasper's test suite has been doing a pretty good job at keeping us honest.
- We should probably avoid solutions where you have to say but don't
look at it in one of the commonest renderers cos it won't work...
I'm not sure that this is reasonable when it comes to RSVG. For me to say that you should look at it in RSVG you can't use features like text-on-a-path either... I think that we should support text-on-a-path :) I'm not sure that RSVG is the most common renderer either, I believe that Firefox and Safari would be.
Well they dont work in the mobile version of safari either... just out of interest, Why doesnt text on path work in RSVG?
Work on my iPhone. I'm guessing that test-on-a-path doesn't work in RSVG because you haven't finished the patch yet ;) I don't think there's a technical reason why not.
--Ted