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TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

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Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GIFs are horrible in terms of memory. Java applets died out of technical reasons (and was replaced by flash) Flash died, because it was proprietary and Adobe did not open it up. (and flash was vector animation btw.) Otherwise it surely would still be around. And in a way it is, as you can export flash animations to the html canvas element. And some people do that (with quirks) In other words, a simple, but powerful v…

>Flash died, because it was proprietary and Adobe did not open it up. (and flash was vector animation btw.) I think the iPhone refusing to support Flash had far more to do than the underlying business practices or IP.

At its end it was not used much for vector animation as it was used as for playing video on the web.

But it had a reputation for being insecure, and for being slow — because it retained the ability to put vector animation on top of videos.

When HTML 5 was adopted with video playback tags (safer, faster, open), that killed it for web video.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO that defeats the purpose of using this format if you have to write things to compile to it. If you do that you might as well just compile to the binary format since you won't be editing your canonical representation anyway. I'd imagine with image formats you'd want to pick a format that is the easiest possible thing to parse and consume while not harming it's "editableness" and I don't think S-expressions fit tha…

Tvg is a binary format? It's not really human readable. Compiling to it is a natural thing to be doing.

Sorry, was responding to the last part of your sentence.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size is not really an issue for any compression algorithm. I've seen quite a few small XML parsers that don't bother with the full spec and only implement a subset.

Even when you compress XML, it's still around 10% bigger than JSON, and around 40% bigger than protobuf (not endorsing either, just examples). Furthermore, making the compressor work harder isn't free. The time to compress and decompress XML is roughly 2x higher than with JSON, and if you decompress the data before using it, XML will still hit you wrt RAM usage. All of these would be fine if XML offered you some real…

XML does offer some really good advantages when it comes to storing strings and sub-documents. I would absolutely not want to write any kind of document in JSON, but XML has been used successfully for a great many document formats.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#94
post #52
post #7

There are many other popular vector graphics formats beyond those mentioned here. Lottie has already displaced SVG for animation/motion graphics, and for static content IconVG exists and is backed by Google. There's also PDF, PostScript, Flash, the glyf format in OpenType, etc.

Franky somebody should do like a TinyDF replacement for pdf... That's also a somewhat bloated format at this point. Ideally though, the tiny* formats should be forward compatible (?) and interpretable as a valid non-Tiny* document. That would be quite nice for wider adoption (like JSON).

PDF/A is a standard with a bunch of features excluded.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#95
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Franky somebody should do like a TinyDF replacement for pdf... That's also a somewhat bloated format at this point. Ideally though, the tiny* formats should be forward compatible (?) and interpretable as a valid non-Tiny* document. That would be quite nice for wider adoption (like JSON).

PDF/A is a standard with a bunch of features excluded.

As someone who has implemented generating PDF/A documents, I can say it is still a very complicated format, and I would be very happy if it was replaced with something a little more straightforward.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#98
post #18

For simple image generation, nothing beats SVG or EPS. For years, these two technologies have let me add cool stuff to PDFs and web pages without the need for expensive/complex/insecure libraries. It is going to be pretty hard to beat the ease of generating these formats.

Thinking about SVG and EPS inside a PDF reminds me of a Turducken Ꙭ

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#99
post #97

What about accessibility? SVG can support it, https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/access.html Just converting text to vector paths will ruin accessibility, and also hurt SEO / discoverability.

If you need complex graphics that need multiple accessibility nodes, stick with SVG.

If you need the "tiny" part of TinyVG, add an aria label to the UI node that renders it. Should work well for icons, logos, etc.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#100

> How will this look in different browsers? Let's test! obviously different font widths for rendering of SVG text in different browsers/font stacks > That didn't go as expected. I thought that at least both files on my Linux machine look the same, but it seems like Firefox doesn't like the font-size specification, while Chrome and Edge do. I asked the Render-A-Webpage-As-An-SVG-framework guy about this last week. He…

Nope, I also encountered text rendering issues with SVG.

I reckon devs will just drop SVG in favor of a PNG or re-export with text as paths instead of complaining somewhere.

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