Comments from a svg guru

[Vadim Plessky]

On Thursday 31 October 2002 2:15 pm, Jos van den Oever wrote:
|  by Andreas Neumann on Wednesday 30/Oct/2002, @22:15
|  > I therefore think that the KDE team should give SVG top priority as a
|  > base-technology for the KDE-desktop (SVG enable all KDE-applications)
|  > and as an integral part of the Konqueror browser. Combined with other
|  > XML technology and scripting, SVG allows very useful applications and is
|  > for the first-time a fully documented vendor-neutral graphics format as
|  > an exchange format between different applications and platforms. I am
|  > very happy that ksvg (svg.kde.org) already exists - but I think that it
|  > should have more support and priority within the KDE team than it has
|  > now.
[...]
|  Most importantly, good XML support needs to be available. Right now,
|  kdelibs/khtml/xml has a good XML implementation. Unfortunately, it's
| isolated in khtml and there are problems using this implementation with
| KSVG. A dir structure with maybe kxml/khtml and kxml/ksvg would make much
| more sense. This is of course no trivial matter, but essential in the long
| run. It will also simplify other XML support in KDE and KOffice.

Yes, SVG should not depend on HTML.
You can design an entire site in SVG, without any HTML code. 
As SVG supports hyperlinks, it's pretty much do-able (and some people indeed 
do it!)

|
|  Writing a _fast_ SVG widget is a daunting task. But this is all the more
|  reason to do so, because centralizing the efforts of writing a canvas
| class will only be benneficial for the development speed of all subsequent
| graphical applications as varied as games, drawing programs, plotting
| tools, icon renderers and browers parts.

There is an on-going work by Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com>
and Carl Worth <cworth at east.isi.edu> (in XFree86 CVS) on extending Render 
extension (Xr and Xc extensions).
You may want to check threads:
 [Render] Trouble in trapezoid land
 [Render] Re: Sub-pixel area computations
 [Render] Re: Triangles vs. Trapezoids
on Xfree86's RENDER list.

It seems this will be in XFree86 4.3.0  (XF-4.2.99 was tagged in CVS, 4.3.0 is 
not far away)

So, it can be that we will get accelerated AA-rendering (of geometric 
primitives) pretty soon :-)

BTW:  you can also design very nice User Interface using OpenGL.
That's what Apple did in MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar).

it's very convinient when every element of UI (including icons) is small 
OpneGL element / animation.
But this requires advanced 3D graphics card, installed on every desktop.

|
|  Best regards, Jos van den Oever

Cheers,
-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
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