Re: [Inkscape-user] Mission
On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 13:44:04 -0700
Andrew Kurn <kurn@...3346...> wrote:
While viewing those videos about fund-raising, one point stuck in
the back of my mind. Make sure you know who your target audience is.
Inkscape has bothered me a little bit by being neither quite fish
or fowl. It tries to be friendly to the artist, but it forces
him to learn a lot about the nature of SVG. In fact, its founding
principle seems to be to use SVG as its internal representation.
(Is there a mission statement?)
I happen to like it, but that's because I'm a professional programmer,
so formal languages are my bread and butter. But, if /I/ am the
target audience, then the direct manipulation of XML is too weak
for my taste. (I use Emacs. My favorite scenario would be to
squirt the XML over to Emacs, edit, and squirt it back. . . .
(with some indication of what is selected, but that's for another
thread.))
So that's the conflict.
That is, it seems to me that the goal of making it friendly to
the artist and friendly to the programmer are in conflict.
Maybe you can do both.
I view it as friendly to the artist, but with the added benefit that
the artist can make it do the undoable by manually editing SVG.
A second SVG benefit is it can be directly viewed in a browser or
viewer, it can be directly manipulated by other graphics programs, it
can be programmatically changed or enhanced by a home-grown computer
program.
I don't see where a native format of SVG constrains use of the GUI.
What else would the native format be? YAML? JSON? Some database in
SQLite? Some binary or text format that really boils down to a subset
copied from SVG, because SVG already captures all the needed data?
One more thing: Humans perform amazingly once they shed their mental
blocks. There's no law of nature saying that artists lack the IQ to
edit SVG. Sure, they'll need to do some trial and error to see what
changes an SVG change makes in the drawing, and what changes a drawing
change makes in the SQL. It will require a couple days dedicated
learning. So what? To me, an artist not willing to spend time learning
his tools isn't very dedicated to his craft.
I'd recommending leaving the native format as SVG.
SteveT