[SVG 1.2] Make it less complex!

Dear Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group,

  As you are all aware, the complexity and implementation cost of
a technology is measured in terms of how many sheets of paper are
required to print the specification; I must thus ask you to reduce
the complexity of the SVG 1.2 specification in order to enable its
widespread adoption on the web. Please do all of the following:

  * Remove all non-essential content such as illustrations,
    examples, inline schema fragments, membership listings,
    element/attribute/property summaries, and the TOC
  * set the font-size in the style sheet to at most 9px
  * set the line-height in the style sheet to at most 8px
  * set the letter-spacing in the style sheet to less than 0px
  * set all paddings and margins in the style to at most zero

Testings showed that already the last four steps reduce the complexity
and implementation cost of the SVG specification to less than one third
and I am confident that the removal of the non-essential content will
lead to a further significant reduction. I believe that less than 20%
of the original complexity are a realistic goal, enabling SVG to go
where no one has ever gone before.

For future SVG specification, there is room for even more improvements,
you can save a lot of text by less verbose prose descriptions of the
technical content. This technique as commonly used by other specs can
easily adopted by the SVG specification, for example the ridiculously
complicated discussion on filters can easily replaced by a much easier
to understand description like, "make it look nice, like in Photoshop".
And then you must start modularizing the specification so that you can
just reference other parts of the specification^W^W^W^W successful and
simple technologies, so that your specification would become *really*
simple, I could even think of just a single printed page!

Thanks.

Received on Thursday, 15 July 2004 06:39:23 UTC