Re: Minutes, July 15 2009 SVG WG telcon

On Jul 15, 2009, at 10:08 , Cameron McCormack wrote:
>   ED: i've wanted a better DOM since i joined the group, basically

I think we all have :) There are a few things I'd like to point out  
here:

   - I think it's worth experimenting a little bit with various APIs  
before committing to them. As you probably know I hacked together a  
canvas-SVG bridge[0] that translates canvas calls to SVG, with the  
additional feature that it supports canvas features that are in the  
spec but not currently in browsers. Feel free to hack on it to add new  
experimental ideas.

   - I'm not convinced that E4X is the answer here, but it might be a  
source of inspiration. Whatever simpler API we want I think that it  
should be serialisable at some point, ergo convertible into a DOM upon  
request.

   - Before blaming DOM manipulation for all of the trouble (though it  
certainly is the reason for a large part of it) it would be nice to  
have actual numbers so that we could measure the improvements. I'd  
further like to know if other parts of SVG (SMIL, use, non-native text  
layout) contribute to the overhead. Maybe some of our implementer  
friends could give us some profiling information (or at least some  
vague data)?

   - There exist some "simpler DOM" efforts, such as the Web DOM[1],  
we might want to look there as well.

The canvas API is very low level, which has spawned a number of APIs  
on top that make simple things simple (like, say, drawing a circle). I  
think we should list and investigate those (e.g. Processing.js, which  
I've been meaning to show working on top of SVG — it shouldn't be much  
pain). And while we're in there, there are quite a few handy animation  
APIs we might want to take a look at.


[0] http://berjon.com/hacks/canvas-getsvg/
     http://code.google.com/p/canvas-svg/
[1] http://simon.html5.org/specs/web-dom-core

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
     Feel like hiring me? Go to http://robineko.com/

Received on Wednesday, 15 July 2009 10:56:58 UTC