RE: Proposal: <star> element

Olaf Hoffman writes:
----------
This is comparable to the problem with the A/a commands,
in SVG tiny without it, one cannot draw elliptical arcs, one can only 
approximate them. 
In both cases this requires mathematical skills in analysis and 
vector algebra (people with only 10 years of  school will not have this, 
in practice even with only 13 years of school they may have trouble 
to get it right).
------------

After 21 years of school, still (despite a math degree and the requisite 4
semesters of calculus), I would not have known how to approximate an
elliptical arc with Bezier curves (I didn't hear the word Bezier until 1988
when I started using Adobe Illustrator -- I was dumbfounded by its speed and
elegance). Drawing one of the two unicursal seven pointed stars [1] without
trigonometry (or a package) would be a fool's exercise.

Perhaps instead of doing a census for stars on the web (including all the
non-vector art examples that may not have proper accessibility, one should
do a census of all the things with radial symmetry. The scientific community
might be able to help weigh in on that subject. Let us not forget that spec
writers tend to not to be representative of humanity at large.

I agree that a good estimate of the number of people doing hand-authored SVG
might be useful. It might be frightening, since the number might be so
terribly low that corporate support for improvement of the SVG standard
might evaporate: let's, then, just assume everyone who needs to draw can use
Inkscape, Illustrator or SVG-Edit, and that everyone who needs to script
images can use JavaScript and D3, JQuery and Snap. Who else is there really?

One way to estimate it would be to look for all those drawings of rectangle
that have coordinate-precision in the quintillionths of a pixel, which have
seven coordinates to draw a pentagon (hence hampering several kinds of
accessibility), or which have gradients and clippaths that are never used.
If one has ever tried to use the imagery from http://openclipart.org/ to use
as a part of a program, that person would know what I mean! It takes, on
average about an hour per image, to get that image ready for use to make its
semantic features wiggle in an animation program.

The point is that hand-authored SVG is better than programmatically
generated SVG. It is smaller, more useable, and provides considerably more
accessibility to large groups of people who might need access to the inner
content of the files. This doesn't mean that a <star> or <veUnion> or
<vePath> [2] or <replicate> or <superpath> should be added to SVG (we don't,
after all, want to make things too easy for non=programmers), but it does
perhaps imply that the advocates of SVG (I believe there are still some of
those around) have an obligation to help point out to the masses, what those
differences might consist of (I agree with Olaf that some quite inspired
work has been done at Wikipedia to reduce file size and increase usability,
accessibility and elegance -- see, for an example using stars, lacking in
accessibility but high on usability and elegance [3] ), why elegant is
better than sloppy (not just from a pedagogical perspective), and how
app-developers really should provide more obvious options for users to
export clean SVG code. I fear that in only five decades we will discover
that much of the programmatically produced SVG content on the web is
completely obsolete owing to reasons of accessibility and re-usability.

Making the SVG spec slightly larger, but more expressive and more robust, in
so far as the introduction of canonical sets of orthogonal primitives (in
the sense of minimalism [4]), is not feature bloat, and while a short term
inconvenience to the writers of specs and, perhaps, a larger one to the
implementers of said specs, it can help to protect us a bit from a world
over-bloated by ideational junk in the "intellectual landfills of the
future" [5].

Cheers
David

[1] http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/stars3.svg 
[2]
http://dev.w3.org/SVG/modules/vectoreffects/master/SVGVectorEffectsPrimer.ht
ml 
[3]
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/Flag_of_the_United_States.svg 
[4] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=12456 
[5] http://www3.wcl.american.edu/cni/0604/38694.html

Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2014 13:19:58 UTC