Authoring SVG / opacity, animate and mask

Hi, Jonathan-

I think that the majority of your points are addressed in my last email:
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2007Aug/0025.html

Further replies inline below...

~:'' ありがとうございました。 wrote (on 8/5/2007 12:21 PM):
> 
> My concern is that after more than a decade 

Just to set the record straight, the First Public Working Draft of SVG 
was on 1999-Feb-11.


> the SVG authoring tools are not easy to use.
> This is not a personal view, but one based on extensive user testing and 
> questioning.

See last email.  Also, the SVG drawing tools are just as easy to use as, 
say, the very popular CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator... because they 
are one and the same, since both of those tools, and many others, export 
to SVG.

If those tools don't meet your needs, it may be because your needs are 
very specialized.  As I suggested in the last email, forming a project 
to address your community's needs may prove very fulfilling.


> Who is tasked with finding out what naive users would like to be able to 
> do easily?

Again, all of us on the SVG WG have that as a goal.  7 years of feedback 
on this list, and on the svg-developers list and IRC (both of which 
provide help for everyone from newbies to gurus) have provided the SVG 
WG with lots of pragmatic use cases we are striving to solve (many of 
which we hope we have addressed in SVG 1.2 Tiny).


> slideshows are generally popular.... in os x, drag over images, 
> ctrl-click slideshow and it's done!
> 
> if Inkscape has a simple method to create a slideshow, I've yet to find 
> it....

See last email.


> I personally find hand coding extremely time consuming.
> It may be that SVG is feature rich, but for a naive author, it's not 
> easy to learn.

It certainly can be time consuming, and like any programming language, 
needs a certain degree of skill.  But not everyone has to handcode it, 
only those whose needs aren't met by the existing authoring tools.

You keep saying "naive users" and "naive authors"... it's not clear what 
demographic you're pointing at.

You've been working with SVG for about as long as I have (and I had no 
formal training in Web languages, nor any experience in JavaScript, when 
I started).  You are asking complex questions about subtle intricacies 
of the spec.  Surely you aren't counting yourself among the "naive"? 
That would be rather disingenuous.


> Today for instance I found Antoine's helpful article, please note well 
> "Advanced" :
> "Advanced SVG Animation Techniques"
> 
> yet I appear to need this and much else besides to set up a simple 
> slideshow with opacity fades.

See last email (in particular, the bit about SVGmaker).  Authors without 
programming skills should expect to use an authoring tool (or to learn 
to program) to create all but the most basic tasks in pretty much any 
programming language, and SVG is no exception.


> personally it seems to me that your opacity example provides ample and 
> sufficient reasoning to support my request.

I think several of us have explained at great length why the opposite is 
true.


> had the author desired they could choose 0.0001 or similar and there 
> would be no issue.

And again, as a default behavior, this would be computationally 
expensive and, I believe, unintuitive for both author and user.  To 
justify adding it to the language, there would need to be sufficient use 
cases (which you still have failed to supply).


> however if the author wishes to provide some scripted fractal like 
> opacity with links it seems this may not be do-able.

Without a concrete example, I can't comment.  My gut feeling is that 
this could simply be done with a complex path shape.


On a final note:
It is frustrating to have to answer completely different and unrelated 
issues in the same thread, i.e. opacity and mask AND the current state 
of authoring tools AND slideshows in SVG.  It makes it very difficult to 
track issues... I am assuming you want your issues to be tracked and 
addressed, correct?  It also leads to forking and overly broad topics. 
In the future, please separate out different issues into different 
threads, so we can properly address them.  In fact, it would be most 
helpful if you were to use our public issue tracking system 
(registration required), though of course this is optional:
    http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/enter_bug.cgi?product=SVG


Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Staff Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Received on Monday, 6 August 2007 09:31:53 UTC