RE: Categories of topics concerning SVG

Yes, I rather like this idea of an orthogonal perspective for organization. It makes good sense.
 
David

________________________________

From: public-svg-ig-request@w3.org on behalf of Rob Russell
Sent: Mon 10/6/2008 10:31 AM
To: SVG IG List
Subject: Re: Categories of topics concerning SVG




I'm not sure if I have a solution to your problem but I notice that all
your groupings are by aspects of SVG itself. There's at least one other
axis - readers think of things from the perspective of their
application. So they could be looking for things like data transforms
(forcharting & graphing), user interface effects (making buttons &
widgets in SVG), 2 1/2 D (getting shadows & perspective effects in SVG),
clipart in SVG, code libraries for using SVG with whatever language (C,
PHP, Ruby, etc) and so on.

It sounds pretty open-ended. Maybe SVG is a pretty large domain to start
from?

Rob Russell
http://www.latenightpc.com/blog/

Dailey, David P. wrote:
> 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
> 
>
>