Adib Taraben wrote:

once upon a time ..., no seriously couple of weeks ago I have been contacted by Joseph Merdas ( shemeri_at_hotmail_dot_com ). He writes a thesis about optimizing SVG. He had couple of questions and needed some answers. I promised him to contact the inkscape list with the many friedly peopels dealing with svg every day for further feedback and background info.

Joseph examines how to optimize SVG in different ways: -optimize for render speed, -optimize for size -etc He has ideas about some tricks that also inkscape is using by simplify feature, also reordering the elements, moving the attributes, etc. One of his concerns is that the change in the structure of a document may corrupt the document for build-in ECMA-script proccessing. Because the elements are differtly orderd, are vanished or have different attributes etc. and so the DOM is deifferent.

Now he has the first result ready. An java implemented optimizer, that also checks the rendering results. I would please everyone to give some feedback. His project page can be found at: http://myfriendsnet.com/svg/survey.php

I think that this would probably be a good feature to integrate into Inkscape. While it might effect scripts using the DOM directly, for things like icons using rsvg it could be a real help. I would love to see render time added to the some of the compliance tests so that we could work on this. If SVG icons take over the desktop like it seems they will, it could make real world differences in desktop performance.

But, that being said. I would dislike it being implemented in Java unless it can be compiled with gcj. Putting it in distros like Debian would be hard without.

--Ted