Re: Proposal: <star> element

Smailus, Thomas O:

...
>searching for "SVG images" brings up a lot of artwork
> that uses stars (and triangles which are also stars)
>

.. to continue this chain of arguments, irregular star like shapes are 
pretty common as well, but not covered by Paul LeBeaus proposal.
Maybe people belonging to nations with regular stars in their flags
(and with a stronger relationship to those kinds of symbols)
are more focussed on these regular shapes, if they talk about 'star', but 
others will be surprised, that the proposal does not cover some other
kinds of popular stars.
To restrict such an element of regular star like shapes pronounces mainly
this local perception in some cultures or parts of the world.
(And because some nations with a big popuplation with good technical
requirements will prefer such shapes, they are more dominant in what we 
can find, if one searches for star like shapes ;o)

For example in germany there is a popular magazine 'Stern' (english: star)
with an irregular star as shape, therefore many people are familar with such
types of shapes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_(magazine)
Similar shapes appear in advertising as well, because they look more
dynamic and individual  than shapes with a discrete rotation symmetry.
If we take this, german speaking people are a big popuplation with good
technical requirements, and even more people get advertising 
therefore one could assume, that stars are typically irregular and only
the regular shapes are a specific exception.
On the other hand, the symmetry results in some specific fascination.
But the intentionally broken symmetry has the potential to focus the
attention of the audience even more - a regular polygon is (only) 
generic maths, an irregular star like shape can be already individual art ;o) 


Paul LeBeau:
>I just wanted to point out that stars are only one half of this proposal.
> This element can do regular polygons as well - including easy triangles
> and diamonds.

It covers even more, fine that it easy to get something like the star of David
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David
Such types consists of subpaths with the shape of a regular polygons, it is
not a regular polygon itself.

And with the attribute type="boundary" one gets another small subset of
shapes as well, those regular stars with an arbitrary inner and outer radius,
here only the ratio between the inner and outer radius is fixed by the
values of the attributes  points and density (what is nice for authors, 
wanting exactly this ratio, but there are much more stars with an arbitrary
ratio of inner to outer radius (or even more than two radii) in heraldry, 
flags and logos, therefore one can surely assume, that these kinds of
stars are of relevance as well.

Furthermore, sometimes such star lik shapes have no cusps, but are
more smooth, not covered for example by stroke-linejoin="round", several
of them are not even comparable to the rect element with the attributes rx and 
ry.

One has to admit, that it is pretty difficult to cover all popular star like 
shapes without a local perception with an element and a simple, 
intuitive attribute or subelement collection, but this star element 
proposal covers only a small subset of shapes often called stars.

For an element with a name 'regularPolygon' the proposal should be
more restrictive (no need for  type="boundary" or the star of David
like shapes consisting of more than one subpath) - but with this
restriction the number of use cases would become even much smaller
(and more boring) for authors.

For an element with the name 'star' it has to cover far more shapes
belonging to this group of shapes people typically call stars.


Olaf

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2014 09:27:34 UTC