RE: Request for Future Feature: Star Element

Olaf Schnabel wrote:
|
| In my opinion we need 2 new graphic elements:
| - a regular polygon with radius, inner radius, number of edges
| - a pie sector with angle, start angle, radius (and maybe an 
| inner radius for ring sectors)

I also outline a basic idea of a triangle, a useful and mathematically
significant shape:

http://www.svg-whiz.com/experiments.html#triangles

While I think a pie slice is too specific an element, a triangle would be
very useful for a variety of domains (such as for math, education, etc., as
well as any time you need to use angles). A parameter to render the
hypontenuse as a circular arc would give you a pie slice.


| I know that each person has a different idea of extending the 
| standard, but from an teachers and application developers 
| point of view the 2 new elements are used very often. And 
| isn't it the main advantage of SVG, that the code is readable 
| and understandable (even for non-programmers)?

Hear, hear!


Philippe Lhoste wrote:
|
| I agree too. Not everybody is using graphical tool or code 
| generators to make their SVG files.

I think this is the key point. Inkscape is a very good drawing app. Its
output is meant to be static images, it seems. When you approach authoring
or content reuse from a different perspective, such as creating SVG
programmatically or with a text-editor, or look at different output such as
animation or GUIs, it's clear that there are other needs.


| This has been already argued (is it only a small fringe or a 
| signifiant portion of SVG creators?) and unless a serious 
| survey is made, this will probably remain controversy.

I think there is a need for graphic artists and designers to start using
SVG, and I think Inkscape goes a long way toward enabling and promoting
that. That being said, I think that currently the largest user base of SVG
by far is developers.


| > That, on the other hand, is a poor choice, in my opinion.
| 
| Sorry, but here I don't understand. What is a poor choice, to 
| make the "smart switching" or to choose not to do it?

I think it would be a better choice to do the smart switching. I think it
would be better still to urge the WG to allow textPath and markers for the
other basic shapes.


| Well, there is a demand on making pie charts easily... 
| Current arc in path is quite hard to use, and is lacking semantics...

Personally, I don't think the elliptical arc is that hard to use, but I've
used it a lot. As for lacking semantics, I think that SVG should constrain
itself to semantics related to geometry, layout, and other graphical
properties; a pie chart has no place in a graphics standard. If you want a
semantic pie chart, make a ChartXML, and render it in SVG using sXBL, or the
like.

Regards-
Doug

Received on Saturday, 27 August 2005 00:39:14 UTC