On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:26:07 +0100, John Pybus <john@...368...> wrote:
If that 'one thing' is to line up a number of generated objects in a visually appealing fashion, or adjust a colour to be more in keeping with the document as a whole, then it wouldn't really be possible without a visual interface. If it's not inkscape's mission to fulfil that role then what SVG editor is?
Speaking as the person who's probably had the most influence on Inkscape's XML code at this point, I'm certainly interested in roundtripping, but it really is difficult. At the moment I'm simply working on getting full roundtripping at the XML Infoset level. We'd need that at least before even thinking about lexical (or byte-level) roundtripping.
Two other issues do need to be considered:
1. At what point does roundtripping become an aesthetic rather than a technical consideration? We already roundtrip essentially all of the portions of Infoset required to correctly implement the Namespaces in XML and SVG standards (though we're still more agressive about changing things in the document than we need to be).
2. At what point would the additional overhead required for roundtripping become unacceptable? We already get complaints about our memory usage -- would all the extra annotations required for lexical roundtripping be worth it?
-mental