Categories of topics concerning SVG

Having recently developed three somewhat similar classifications of SVG content, it reminded me that the dormant librarian in each of us yearns for consistency. It made me wonder if there might be a canonical classification of SVG topics. I believe there are good reasons for not following the organization of the Spec here. http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/ breaks things into 23 chapters (and while 23 is a perfectly admirable number) but methinks the person on the street trying to find information might not want the third of her 23 chapters to be "the Rendering Model." (just a guess). SVG Tiny has 19 chapters (still a prime number!) but 3 is still "the Rendering Model." In writing the book (http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/StateOfArt-Dailey.html) I made a very conscious decision not to follow that organization since the work was intended for at least some who are new to the subject. The book is of course not intended to be comprehensive, so I'm not suggesting that its table of contents is the desired taxonomy.
 
Ultimately the question is how do people trying to find information about SVG look things up? Perhaps our Google friends could spare a bit of there 870 petabytes of data (just guessing) to answer the question of what words co-occur most frequently with searches for "SVG"? Looking at either completions in the google search bar in Firefox, or at "Google trends" surrenders no obvious insights.
 
A current start on such a list of categories might be:
 
Basic drawing primitives 
Colors, Gradients and Patterns
Clipping and Masking
Transforms, Groups and Use
Filters 
SMIL 
Events and Interactivity 
DOM methods and JavaScript
Layout and CSS 
Zooming, panning and viewBox
Fonts 
Relations to other technologies (HTML, XML, AJAX, XSLT)
Comparisons to similar technologies (Flash, Silverlight, Bitmaps)
Editing and Authoring Tools
 
It is clear that the top-level categorization should be relatively finite (George Miller's magic number 7 plus or minus 2 comes to mind) though Dewey chose 10 (because of fingers) and Library of Congress chose 21. Do you see obviously missing categories? Categories that ought to be combined?
 
Perhaps the enumeration of categories should be different from context to context, but the thought that consistency in our collective cataloging on the wiki might be desirable came to mind. If one were to see my desk, one would not get the impression that I am fastidious about such matters.
 
David

Received on Monday, 6 October 2008 14:00:53 UTC