On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 14:10 -0600, Terry Hancock wrote:
When I brought this up on inkscape-user, I was told that a DOM API would (at sometime) be made available which would solve this problem (although now that I think about it, "document" doesn't really fit, though "object model" does -- this may've been a miscommunication?)
I have recently seen "DOM" mentioned in the inkscape-devel archives, but that seems to be a different concept -- the idea of a DOM to describe the SVG file being manipulated, not the Inkscape application doing the manipulation.
Well the reason that DOM has been advocated over other models is that it provides a consistent well documented API for us to support. It means that we can easily maintain compatibility with past and future plugins without having to publish and document an API.
I believe this is one of the largest strengths we've gained by having Inkscape based on SVG. For a large majority of things, there is no debate we've already agreed on a format that is standardized.
Certainly there are features that would be desirable to use inside scripts. This is why I've advocated an interface to allow calling of verbs on a document. If you look at the work done by the guys at GLIMMER I believe they've shown the power of this approach (and I promise to get it integrated shortly!)
--Ted