TedPage: Tiny SVG

This article at Slashdot got everyone thinking about Tiny SVG. Which is basically an SVG standard for small embedded devices including cellphones, and probably watches. Could Inkscape be used to create Tiny SVG files? Here is a good article describing the different SVGs that Jon Cruz sent me.

There are some simple differences between the main SVG spec and the Tiny or Basic ones. Most of these aren't a big deal, as also many of the more advanced things Inkscape doesn't implement yet anyway. The real issue comes down to how to interact with the user - how would they use the tool. And that all gets complicated with the 'switch' statement, which allows for multiple profiles to be chosen based on parameters in the render, so one doc could support multiple profiles.

One solid idea is to use layers to implement this functionality, so you could have a layer that is Tiny, one that is Basic, etc. I think that this might work, except that people will not like the idea of having to recreate everything in the layer to edit it for Tiny support. There is a certain amount of rework required here. It seems like we should be able to automate this.

It seems like you should be able to tell which profiles you'd like your document to be saved in. If you select multiple, then all the features that are different in each profile will be handled with switch statements, and everything else will be left identical. No forced user interaction for that simple use case. Now, if someone is selecting that they'd like this document to only support a particular profile - then the extra features from the other profiles should be inaccessible while using the single profile. This would include greying out the gradient button if one was using "Tiny Only."

Now, that all sounds like a utopia, but how would something like that be implemented - and that is where the real problem comes. Do we want every feature to be marked with which profiles it supports? How do we handle reading in a document that has a switch, that really doesn't make sense to us. Read the best one, ignore the rest and try to recreate them?

Okay, as much as I've babbled, I have no answers for these questions tonight. But, I think they're important ones to think about. Maybe I'll say something better in another post.