Saving vs. Persistent Client-side Data storage

Hi, folks-

Like Jan, I think that a write-to-file functionality would be almost
indispensible for a proper application framework. Use cases are abundant:
    - script-based authoring systems, be they sketching, CAD, mapping, or
otherwise
    - cross-platform collaboration tools
    - any app that allows editing of delivered content

This would largely remove the need for the Adobe-specific "save" PI. In
fact, if could open that method (currently only accessible through Adobe's
context menu) to scripted access, which would be very useful.

There have been several times when I wanted to allow the user to save only a
subset of the whole SVG document, copying only the drawing canvas, and not
all of the interface controls. This could be a first step to DRM (as
troubling as that issue can be).

If done properly, this seems less of a security danger than either opening a
file or the proposed Persistent Client-side Data storage; opening a file
gives access to user data; and persistant data storage, as described in the
Spec, does not alert the user that data is being saved. An explicit dialog
would tell the user exactly what filename was being saved (including the
extension/file type), the new file location (chosen by the user), and how
large it is. Security considerations might only allow files under a certain
size cap to be saved, or even disallow saving anything but XML (even
excluding script tags, if the user's security settings so dictate).

Finally, if you do add some sort of "save" functionality, I think it would
be elegant to allow the same interface to save as SVG, or as a rasterized
version of that document (PNG or JPEG). If saving to the clipboard for
copy/paste operations were tied in as well, it would be handy, so that you
could paste either SVG code or a rasterized image to the paste target. If
you could copy from one SVG document and paste to another, too, that would
be great. This has been suggested in the SVG Accessibility IRC channel:
http://www.peepo.co.uk/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Edit

I've been looking at DOM 3 Load and Save [0] and the idea of Suspend/Resume
in XForms, but couldn't decide if they were a good source of inspiration for
the SVG WG.

Regards-
-Doug

[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-DOM-Level-3-LS-20040205/load-save.html

Received on Saturday, 20 March 2004 19:35:51 UTC