Hi Mental,
This is kind of an out there question but something I've been wondering about for a while...
What would be involved in making Inkscape able to handle templated SVG? I.e., something like:
[% i = 1 %] [% FOREACH foo IN bar %] <rect x="[% foo.x %]" y="[% foo.y %]" width="100%" height="100%" fill="[% foo.color %]" id="rect[% i %]" /> [% i = i + 1 %] [% END %]
The stuff in the [% %] brackets is Template::Toolkit macro syntax. (Similar to <? in PHP, and so forth in other templating languages.)
The perennial issue with templated stuff is that once a given file's been templated, the designer can't easily pull it back into the original design program to touch stuff up. (Although maybe the professional design programs have solutions for this nowadays.)
We've heard off and on about people wanting to use Inkscape for doing web layout, so it's fairly logical that if we gain that capability, immediately the next request would be for templating capability.
However, I'm not really even sure how you'd handle folding these bits of non-SVG text in. I'm sure Inkscape would just choke on it. But I remember long ago we had a similar issue with SVG comments, and got that sorted out. What would need to be done to make Inkscape accept non-SVG templating syntax?
Bryce