There has been a user complaining in several reports in the bug tracker about the Inkscape SVG giving away more information than he would like and the Plain SVG not including as much information as needed and I think it raises various questions.
How plain should Plain SVG be? Should it include metadata? (Based on SVG having a metadata tag I think it probably should include some form of metadata)
Inkscape has as a stated goal conforming closely to the SVG specificiation but inlcudes a whole lot of information in the Sodipodi and Inkscape namespace. The stock response is this someone helps compatability with Sodipodi but is this really true anymore? Surely some of it like including the sodipodi version number is just as likely to confuse the matter?
The old sodipodi docbase attribute seem like it could have been useful to avoid link breakage if a the drawing file has been moved around. Is this actually doing anything useful? Users have expressed privacy concerns as it effectively embeds the path to their homedirectory including username in every document.
It seems there must be a way to express a lot more of the old sodipodi metadata using SVG (or Dublin Core or other parts of XMP we are already using). If the old timers ;) could clarify if any of this cruft is useful anymore it would make it easier to write clear bug reports and break into much smaller parts which bits might be replaced (hopefully making the same information available in Plain SVG where possible).
Given the importance of the OpenDocument standard and how they are essentially using their XML namespaces to fill out gaps not covered by SVG might it be better to include their namespaces rather than adding any more to the Inkscape (or Sodipodi) namespace?
I hope people can clarify what old bits are still needed and what could potentially be cleaned up and replaced with standard SVG. With a bit more information hopefully I will be able to add useful comments to bug reports and perhaps add some goals for clearing out the old non-standard cruft somewhere on the Roadmap.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/