On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 23:00 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
I understand that it's valid SVG. But, it's against the spirit of a vectored format.
It seems to me that we are slowly drifting to the "right vs. comfortable" type of discussion :) I'm afraid that by being overidealistic we are hurting ourselves.
Your thinking that I'm being an SVG idealist, which is simply not the case. Actually what I'm being is a pessimist on our ability to keep the project at a high level if we allow for the bitmap fallback option. It's easy, it's simple, and it's ugly. And, right now, I'm not convinced it is necessary.
If we accept a bitmap fallback option would there be such a thing as LPEs? One of the hardest things there is figuring out how to connect it back into a path and make it reasonable for future editing. I think that, if we allowed bitmap fallbacks, it would be unlikely that we'd have such a cool feature that required a fair amount of upfront leg work for a very interesting result. I'm not convinced that upfront work would have happened without a policy of being able to show up in other SVG renderers.
I'm not fan of the SVG standardization process. I've bitched about it publicly and privately, and I think I even have complained to Chris Lilley about it at LGM. But, that doesn't mean that we should effectively abandon it. Quite the contrary. The reality is by sticking to a standard for our format, we've both simplified and added complexity to Inkscape. But, what we've removed 100% is dealing with format issues and debating them on this list. Formats are tricky, and difficult to get right, I'd hate to be in the business of doing just that.
Since it seems that I'm a minority opinion on this issue, I'll stick to trying to limit the spread of this cancer in the codebase. What I'd like to see is that for every bitmap fallback, it's *proven* that what we're falling back on can't be implemented in SVG. Explain the solutions that have been tried and why they can't work. The whole thing. I'd like it to really be a last resort.
--Ted