On Friday, 19 June 2015 at 14:47:10 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Friday, 19 June 2015 at 14:18:49 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
Do you guys have any real arguments against SVG? It is
currently the most useful interchangeformat for 2D vector
graphics.
You want reasons I dislike SVG? I can address a few different
levels.
It's unbelievably complex even if you reduce it to just the
still-graphics parts. This means implementing a renderer it is
not even close to trivial (you need to support a huge chunk of
CSS, for one thing) and rendering consistency is difficult to get
right even in fairly simple situations.[1] Fill rules, path
joining, stroke scaling, markers, filters, paint order, the list
goes on. It's very byzantine.
It's DOM-based anyway, which means you can't reasonably expect
good performance when manipulating it in an editor (it only pays
lip-service to the concept of "human readable", so you really
NEED an editor) or memory requirements. Even just rendering it
for output on a device has poor performance (I don't even know if
Nvidia has even bothered putting more work into their OpenGL
extension for 2D vectors). Even relatively simple animations in
SVG can peg a CPU core.
It only supports linear gradients, which makes it basically
useless for artistic work unless you live in a "Modern" bubble.
There's no support for variable stroke width. You can only
define one stroke and one fill, so if you want to composite those
things, you need to do a lot of duplication. On top of that,
blending can only be done through filters (which are milquetoast
at best). And text in SVG is...ugh, let's not even start.
SVG is somewhat useful if you only need simple diagrams with
solid colours and you don't trust PNG for some reason.
-Wyatt
[1] http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=1257
