proposal to restrict clipPath in SVG Basic

Greetings SVG developer community,

The SVG Working Group requests feedback from content creators
on the following issue.

There is a proposal to restrict a clip path to one rectangle element
in SVG Basic. Currently SVG Full (SVG 1.0 and 1.1) allow multiple
arbitrary additive shape elements (paths and basic shapes) to be a
clip path, while SVG Basic restricts a clip path to one shape
element. SVG Tiny does not have clipping.

Without getting into the details, restricting <clipPath>
to only one <rect> child has a performance benefit in that
the resulting transformed clip is always a quadrilateral, not
an arbitrary shape, such as text. You can still achieve the 
same visual result with a <mask> element, although it is likely
that this will be slower that clipping.

NOTE: SVG Basic only! SVG Full (1.1 and 1.0) will still have 
complete clipping support.

What do you think of this proposal? How often do you use
clipping in your SVG code? What type of clipping: rectangles, text,
shapes? Do you animate <clipPath> objects? Could you get away
with simulating a clip by drawing around an object or using the
<pattern> element? Will you author content explicity for SVG Basic? 

Dean

Received on Monday, 21 January 2002 01:36:25 UTC