Scaling via an explicit "transform" attribute and zooming via a user interface are two completely different things and should be treated as such.

Personally I am not excited about having line thickness stay the same size when a user is zooming in and out of a drawing. Zooming out too far would cause elements to overlap.

I would be interested in the ability to place a flag on a "transform" attribute such that line thickness and font size could be excluded from the transformation. Something like this: PATHS,LINES,POLYLINES,POLYGONS: -transform coordinates of all points -do not transform line thickness CIRCLES,ELLIPSES -transform center point and radii -do not transform line thickness RECTANGLES -transform location of corners -transform the radii of any rounded corners -do not transform line thickness TEXT -transform only the location of the text -do not scale font size -do not scale letter spacing, word spacing, etc.

I've been tasked by the SVG Working group to summarize scaling issues in SVG. What I mean by scaling issues, is things that one perhaps doesn't want scaled when zooming in or out on a drawing. An example would be a non-scaling line width for technical drawings (this has already been accepted for inclusion into SVG 2.0).

Inkscape doesn't have any zoom independent features (except for outline mode) but it does include options for when objects are scaled or moved:

1. Scaling stroke width when scaling an object.
2. Scaling rectangle corners with scaling rectangles.
3. Scaling/moving gradients when objects with gradients are moved.
4. Scaling/moving patterns when objects with patters are moved.

These would be candidates for non-scaling while zooming. Are there any other cases where non-scaling would while zooming would be of interest?