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SVG can do that?

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Re: SVG can do that?

#131

Post by vbezhenar »

amelius wrote: post #124
starmole wrote: post #49

This showcases what's wrong with SVG: It does way too much! To be useful as a vector image format, there should be strict rules (and less cruft). Why is there no libsvg like libjpeg or libpng? Why have interaction as part of an image format? SVG lives in an uncanny valley between jpeg and flash/js. I think there is still a big need for a real vector interchange and display format. Right now people pick a "good" subse…

But how to deal with things like line-wrapping, when fonts have unknown size? Somehow, it should be possible to programmatically determine how each line is broken up. A similar argument holds for hinting at low pixel sizes. This means it is inevitable that SVG should be Turing-complete.

Image should be self-contained. Proper vector format should convert text into a set of vector primitives.

Re: SVG can do that?

#133

Post by tempodox »

starmole wrote: post #49

This showcases what's wrong with SVG: It does way too much! To be useful as a vector image format, there should be strict rules (and less cruft). Why is there no libsvg like libjpeg or libpng? Why have interaction as part of an image format? SVG lives in an uncanny valley between jpeg and flash/js. I think there is still a big need for a real vector interchange and display format. Right now people pick a "good" subse…

> It does way too much!

And even so, it still has no hairline. All line widths are finite and change when zooming.

Re: SVG can do that?

#134

Post by tannhaeuser »

tangue wrote: post #126
eponeponepon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a shame that XSLT has such a poor image - v1.0 was troublesome for sure, but the modern language is remarkably flexible, expressive and elegant, as long as you leave your procedural baggage at the door. It's not without its wobbly bits, but show me a language that isn't.

SOAP, RDF and the semantic web clique, and other monstruosities of the 2000s gave XML a bad name but XSLT is nice. Indeed it would have been a nicer solution than responsive css to tackle the challenges of mobile devices.

I've done quite extensive XSLT development and like it for particular tasks, but I think XSLT's weak points are

1. It's Turing-complete, which means you can just use any other language for XML manipulation as well such as JavaScript (has DOM language bindings) or Prolog (rule/pattern based like XSLT) or maybe LISP (like DSSSL was). The benefit is that using a mainstream language gives you better mindshare and infrastructure such as APIs for DB access, IDE support for testing, etc. which I found inevitably necessary in every large XSLT project

2. XSLT 2 and 3 only has a single implementation (Saxon) by the same author as the XSLT spec itself - not my idea of a standard (and, in fact, not meeting W3C's criteria of at least two interoperable implementations).

XSLT works well if you need lots of literal XML content to be produced to the output, but will get verbose, degenerative, and awkward (priority rules) for highly dynamic content.

Re: SVG can do that?

#135

Post by neoeldex »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #101
polymeris wrote: post #28

SVG works so fantastically well with React -- it's just part of the DOM, after all. Unless there are performance concerns, that reason alone would make me choose it over Canvas every time. Shameless plug, one of my first experiments with SVG+react (+cljs): https://polymeris.github.io/carlos/ Done in one day, without knowing the tech.

I would say not fantastically - it is part of the DOM, but it is 1. XML - so namespaces? 2. SVG has it's own DOM - it builds on an extends the HTML DOM but React only understands the HTML DOM. But I could also say these were minor quibbles.

That's just not true, react does understand and is able to create svg elements in the svg namespace.

Re: SVG can do that?

#136

Post by abritinthebay »

ygra wrote: post #97
abritinthebay wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not really SVG that’s being bad there - it’s that browsers haven’t optimized for it. They will if more people use it. SVG in Chrome can be particularly painful due to their mediocre support of some things (sometimes outright contradicting the spec). That’s a vendor issue tho, nothing intrinsic to the format.

Ironically we found that IE had the best SVG performance for quite a while (by now the others have mostly caught up). And then they broke a lot of things behaviour-wise in Edge again for quite some time. Performance was still great, but if your image doesn't look like it should it doesn't help.

True, though I’ve often found you have to be doing some rather obscure or strange things to screw up basic display

Or advanced CSS.

Re: SVG can do that?

#137

Post by yoz-y »

vbezhenar wrote: post #131
amelius wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how to deal with things like line-wrapping, when fonts have unknown size? Somehow, it should be possible to programmatically determine how each line is broken up. A similar argument holds for hinting at low pixel sizes. This means it is inevitable that SVG should be Turing-complete.

Image should be self-contained. Proper vector format should convert text into a set of vector primitives.

The files could get quite huge after that. Also one feature of svg (whether it is an advantage is for everyone to decide) is that it can render fonts as they are rendered in the other parts of OS. Which is why it can be seamlessly embedded.

Re: SVG can do that?

#138

Post by jccalhoun »

yborg wrote: post #71
mikekchar wrote: post #67

One of funnest projects I worked on at Corel was called "Smart Graphics Studio" (I'm guessing most of the people who worked on it also read HN, so "Hi!"). It was an absolutely stupid idea: Some insane PGM read that XSLT could transform any XML into any other XML. Then they read that SVG was XML. They put 2 and 2 together and got a billion: You could draw a picture in SVG and then modify it intelligently (through XSLT…

I guess I'm dumb, but I have no idea what 'PGM' is supposed to mean in this context.

I have no idea what half of that comment means (I'm not a programmer) so you aren't alone! (No insult meant to the original commenter!)

Re: SVG can do that?

#139

Post by baldfat »

starmole wrote: post #49

This showcases what's wrong with SVG: It does way too much! To be useful as a vector image format, there should be strict rules (and less cruft). Why is there no libsvg like libjpeg or libpng? Why have interaction as part of an image format? SVG lives in an uncanny valley between jpeg and flash/js. I think there is still a big need for a real vector interchange and display format. Right now people pick a "good" subse…

It isn't perfect and it works inside of OpenFL but Haxe has a svg render in OpenFL that makes it much smaller in size to import and is more stream lined.

https://github.com/openfl/svg

Re: SVG can do that?

#140

Post by mikekchar »

eponeponepon wrote: post #100
mikekchar wrote: post #67

One of funnest projects I worked on at Corel was called "Smart Graphics Studio" (I'm guessing most of the people who worked on it also read HN, so "Hi!"). It was an absolutely stupid idea: Some insane PGM read that XSLT could transform any XML into any other XML. Then they read that SVG was XML. They put 2 and 2 together and got a billion: You could draw a picture in SVG and then modify it intelligently (through XSLT…

It's such a shame that XSLT has such a poor image - v1.0 was troublesome for sure, but the modern language is remarkably flexible, expressive and elegant, as long as you leave your procedural baggage at the door. It's not without its wobbly bits, but show me a language that isn't.

I should probably admit that I really like XSLT (perhaps I'm insane too), but it was really unsuited to the task we were using it for. I've since done quite a bit of XSLT and it's definitely the main tool I'd use if I wanted to screen scrape some HTML, for instance. But can you imagine someone saying "We want you to draw paths between points and they can't cross. And we want you to do it in XSLT"? I mean, you can do it... but... "not fun" doesn't begin to describe the pain.
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