Doug Schepers wrote:
Jasper van de Gronde wrote (on 7/15/10 4:47 AM):
... 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.
A new path command is not a large burden to place on renderers. I realize that Javascript is easier to code than C, but I put together my script lib in an afternoon. How much time would that spare people trying to hand-author Béziers? I think it's a very good investment of implementers time.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't talking about this specific proposal, but rather the more general idea. SVG is great in many respects, but it is a very complex and subtle standard. Believe me when I say this does put a burden on any implementation.
However, don't let that stop you. In my mind the right solution here wouldn't be to make SVG simpler, but rather to make it easier to make a renderer. One of the things I've been thinking about is making a different (much more basic) format and defining how SVG maps to that format. At the very least it would make the standard much less ambiguous, but I expect it would also help in finding problem areas, and it could help implementations by suggesting a way to break down rendering.