Re: [SVG 1.2] Make it less complex!

Thanks for your well-thought through comments Bjoern.

I'm not sure we'll be able to address all of them
in the SVG 1.2 timeframe unfortunately. As a temporary
measure I've set font-size to 0px and display to 'none'
on everything but the h1 element.

For future work, maybe SVG 2.0, we would probably remove
not only the text of the specification, but also all the features,
except for <rect>, which will be constrained to width and
height of 1px. This should be enough to allow any 2D
graphical operation to be implemented, and we don't even have
to waste space in the specification by telling people how!

Dean

On Thu 15 Jul 2004, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:

> 
> 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 07:47:32 UTC