[Uml-devel] u2 user interface

[Luis De la Parra Blum]

Hi,
due to work (and some personal) reasons I havent been able to keep up with 
mail traffic for the past week or so,  the thread is probably already over, 
but...

> here's a question... how viable is it to use svg for all of our primary
> views? i'm not entirely sure what it would require. i suspect that ksvg has

I used to be convinced that using SVG for the display was the way to go, but 
right now I'm not so sure anymore...
altough having SVG as the internal rendering framework would be great and 
would have a ton of advantages, it would not be so easy as at first might 
appear.

KSVG is a project to render SVG as a konq. part, so it's the first option 
you'd look at, but for what I've seen it is not yet so stable, and it seems 
to have some major design flaws, so it will likely suffer a redesign/rewrite 
in the near future.
Other point is that KSVG is only the rendering part, so you'd have to 
implement all the user intereaction yourself.

There is another project called K2B, that bases on KSVG and aims to be a SVG 
editor. If you really want to go for SVG, then I'd say this is the place to 
start. I tested it a couple of weeks ago (just for a half an hour or so). you 
can create basic shapes and moving around, but it still lacks a lot in the 
user-interaction (is a very young project and I think there is only one guy 
behind it).  so altough it would be much easier than starting from scratch, 
it would not be like "we just plug it in, and it works" either.

I also noticed some performance issues with K2B.. creating a simple rectangle 
and moving it around already had problems... I'm not sure , but I think this 
could be part of the KSVG issues that could get fixed in the future..

so, to sum up... if you want to use SVG, you better be ready to get involved 
in KSVG and K2B and start coding for them to... if you wait for them to have 
something stable and working so that you can just integrate it in umbrello, 
you can be waiting a long time.

salud,

luis

p.s.  I find the whole hyperlinking idea very interesting. just remember that 
you dont *need* SVG to implement it...although it'd be more natural to have 
hyperlinks in a XML document, they are really nothing more than actions to be 
executed when a certain event occurs (mouse click) and can be implemented in 
a normal canvas / widget rendering as well.