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What is wrong with SVG?

• From: "Don Park" <donpark@d...>
• To: "XML-DEV (E-mail)" <xml-dev@x...>
• Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 13:58:54 -0800

Now that we had a nice "In praise of SVG" thread, I think it
is now time for a bit of roasting to see if any loose parts
falls off.  If SVG is so great, I think it deserves some more
peer review.  If you see anything you donot like in SVG, its
time to speak up before it gets copper-plated.

Speaking for me, I like the basic premise of SVG and am looking
forward to using it very much.  So when I heard about Jasc's
SVG editor (Trajectory Pro), I downloaded and started playing
with it.  Neat!  Then I looked at the SVG source files.  What
I saw was a bunch of <path> elements with monstrous 'd' attributes.

Here is an example:

<path d="M -9156.6833 4804.3804 l 7.8300 2.4368 2.4277 -0.1274 1.3000 0.1870
h 0.0069
  l  0.8736 -1.2764 0.3692 -0.5917 0.0397 -0.0057 0.0221 -0.0328
0.6615 -0.0927
  0.0664 0.0141 0.1335 -0.0199 3.8513 0.8465 2.0401 1.2276 0.5585 -0.2380
  0.0045 0.0011 1.8395 0.4616 0.9720 -0.1560 0.0404 -0.0409 0.3983 -0.0297
  ... [387 lines similar to above]

Is this proper use of XML?  Why on earth would anyone stuff this
much data into a single attribute?  Why not use child elements
instead of M for moveto in a monster attribute?  Why bother with
short non-intuitive attribute name like 'd' when its size of its
value can be so big?  How am I supposed to parametize SVG graphics
if everything is hardwired?

I suspect there are some logical explanations for this, so I would
like to hear from some of the SVG WG members on this and issues
raised by others on this thread.  I am looking forward to being
slammed hard with some compelling arguments.

Best,

Don Park    -   mailto:donpark@d...
Docuverse   -   http://www.docuverse.com


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