bulia byak wrote:
My humble opinion is that, with the current official standard still not 100% supported in a lot of software (I'm not speaking only of Inkscape), adding more fancy features would be premature.
I also think that SVG, as the graphic core, should only support things that are very difficult or impossible to do in upper layers, like filters or color management. Things like spiros or polygons (another thing they wanted to add that I was against) are best done via extensions, the way Inkscape does them. This way SVG renderers (as opposed to editors) are freed from the burden of implementing these algorithms.
We discussed this general issue a bit at LGM and basically the SVG WG does not see SVG as "the graphic core", but rather as something that can be used for (hand-)authoring and animation. For example, they would also be interested in adding the notion of a layer. It's a bit like we're using SVG as assembly language while they're trying to develop C++.
I can see why they would want that, as it would be pretty cool to have a format that can be edited interoperably by different editors, and it can be very hard to animate a spiro for example if the renderer has no notion of it (you'd have to animate the bezier, which would not have the same effect).
But I think you're absolutely right that this is putting a pretty big burden on renderers and that it might be better to have a more focussed format. Personally I'm thinking that it might be best to select a subset of SVG and/or create a different format specifically for this purpose, but feel free to tell the SVG WG how you feel about this kind of thing on the SVG mailing list.