[Sugar-devel] [Karma] impressed by SVGWeb, so far

[Bryan Berry]

On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 19:34 -0700, S Page wrote:
> > hm, the more I look at it the more it seems that the svg web project
> > page shows off the power of regular svg ...  svg-web is perhaps more focused
> > on cross-browser support.
> 
> Yes.  My understanding is svg-web is mostly a hack to wrap the XML of
> SVG in a script tag so that the script can make it work in Microsoft's
> joke browsers.  Just get rid of the <script> tag, maybe add <!doctype
> html> at the top, and their examples of SVG in HTML should work fine
> in decent browsers without that overhead.
> 
> > and doesn't provide high-level drawing functions like raphaeljs does.
> 
> 1) You should be able to inject new SVG by manipulating the DOM,
> thereby  changing the SVG and making new stuff appear.  svg-web
> includes some DOM manipulation but so do other JS toolkits.
> 
> 2) There is limited animation capability in SVG+SMIL (careful many of
> the examples on the Web are stuck using the Adobe syntax for embedding
> SVG).
> 
> http://www.kevlindev.com/tutorials/basics/index.htm is a nice intro to
> both techniques.

tks, I will definitely check out that link

> 3)  There are also weird mutants like
> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/rendering-svg-canvas-burst/ , where
> as I understand it the Burst JavaScript framework can read in
> fragments of drawings from SVG files and then animate them on a
> canvas.  E.g.  <http://hyper-metrix.com/burst/development/doc/demos/js/GitHub%27s-Octocat.htm>

We like Burst but it looks like no work has been done on it since last
April

> Lots of ways to do it!
> <https://www.svgopen.org/2009/papers/54-SVG_vs_Canvas_on_Trivial_Drawing_Application/>
> is a paper that tries to compare canvas and SVG, but there's no
> definitive answer.

I think canvas is better for drawing apps, but I think it is too much
for Karma to support both svg and canvas and too much to ask potential
devs to learn both.

I am going to do some experiments this week w/ raphaeljs and dojox.gfx .
If subzero and I like working w/ them, will consider changing the Karma
API to use one of those libraries for everything and not use <canvas> at
all.

can u recommend svg libraries besides the ones I mentioned?

-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org