Moving SvgPart from kdegraphics to kdebase/runtime

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Monday, 16. June 2008, Olivier Goffart wrote:
> Le lundi 16 juin 2008, Jakob Petsovits a écrit :
> > So, for the sake of W3C standards compliance, can we please move SvgPart
> > to kdebase/runtime so that it's installed everywhere where KHTML shows
> > up? Or maybe kdelibs itself, depends on what you think is more
> > appropriate. Given the size of the codebase, I can't imagine any of those
> > to pose any problem, especially when compared to the obvious benefits.
>
> I'm not really in favor of that.
>
> PDF is a standard, and really widelly spread on internet.  And you need
> okular in kdegraphics to open it.  And it's not a problem.

True, but then PDF is not meant for being directly embedded into web pages, 
and is not recommended by the W3C as part of (X)HTML. PDFs are just documents 
that are linked to, while SVG belongs into the web pages themselves.

HTML engines like Gecko, WebKit or Opera won't work towards PDF support 
because having PDFs shown in a separate document viewer is totally fine.
On the other hand, all of the above support SVGs natively as integral part of 
their rendering abilities, which only leaves out Internet Explorer (no SVG 
support) and KHTML (half-baken SVG support).

> Konqueror works nice without SVG support, it's not a hard dependencies.

As long as you don't view pages with embedded SVGs. Of course it's a bit of an 
hen-or-egg problem, but my understanding is that we want to help drive 
adoption of important open standards like this one instead of waiting until 
they're widely used.

> Konqueror should detect svg at runtime, and just show a message to the user
> saying that no svg plugins are installed.

That's where I disagree, as SVG should not be regarded as plugin but as 
fundamental part of the HTML engine's feature set. After all, PNG and JPEG 
are not supported as plugins either but can be expected to work in all cases.

> Also, which others applicaiton can make use of it?
> If it's only konqueror, it could go in apps/konqueror.

Every application that uses KParts in order to display files uses SvgPart to 
display files of SVG mime type. So it's not specific to Konqueror.

> Now, if you have more strong arguments, I may change my mind :-)

I hope the above does it?

Anyways, in the light of Vyacheslav's mail (can someone please moderate? 
thanks) it might be better to leave out on the KPart based approach for
SVG support in Konqueror, and go straight for native support.

Perhaps we can have a quick-fix for this by directly using KSvgRenderer in 
KHTML (a few lines there or a few lines in SvgPart doesn't make such a big 
difference, I assume) and get more elaborate SVG support in 4.2 by 
incorporating Vyacheslav's work.

In short, I retract the call for a SvgPart move, and try to work it out 
without that part.

Wishes,
  Jakob