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SVG is another chapter in the long and storied history of engineers attempting to the question, "How hard can 2D graphics be?" And if you look at the industry s
by hctaw 6y ago
SVG is another chapter in the long and storied history of engineers attempting to the question, "How hard can 2D graphics be?" And if you look at the industry standard answers (from PostScript to AutoLisp to Gerber to SVG) the answer is, "pretty damn hard."
I don't know if you can slim down vector graphics successfully. Every SVG renderer in existence slims down SVG to some degree. The ones that do it the most are used the least because they can't sufficiently express the intent of the designer.
- jansan 6y ago2D vector graphics look easy at the beginning. There are some shapes, some paths, some affince transforms. But if you start to caclulate the length of a cubic bezier or try to find intersections between two cubic bezier curves, things start to get interesting. Then try to implement a solid and fast algorithm for boolean path operations. Next level of difficulty is to offset an arbitrary path, maybe with parametric offset for extra challenge. I have done all of these, and boy, I did not expect the rabbit hole to be that deep.
- qwertay 6y agoI have to wonder if the author is not understanding the hidden complexity of rendering graphics. They make the claim that svg would take over a month to implement which sounds accurate, but then they claim that it could be replaced with a new format which could be implemented in a few days. Surely SVG does not include months of work which is entirely useless. What features are we giving up for this simplicity?