Re: SVG format in metacity, gtk, desklets and build system for Gnome

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 09:13, Marcin Antczak wrote:
> W liście z śro, 03-09-2003, godz. 15:42, John (J5) Palmieri pisze: 
> > On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 08:37, Marcin Antczak wrote:
> > > W liście z śro, 03-09-2003, godz. 13:33, Havoc Pennington pisze: 

[snip]

> > > > If you want to add SVG support for the drawing then please feel free
> > > > to send a patch, but you are going to be embedding SVG in the theme
> > > > file for the drawing, not using SVG for the whole theme.
> > > 
> > > Well... I just ask - why not?
> > 
> > Changing the theme format now would be very bad.  It is now a standard
> > within the Gnome community and ripping it out would invalidate all the
> > great themes that have been created.
> 
> Ohh no I don't agree with you at all.
> Converting any XML to any another XML (SVG) is a piece of cake with some
> well thought XSLT stylesheet and/or Jelly scripts.

As somebody who does document transformations for a living, and as the
maintainer of Yelp's DocBook to HTML stylesheets, I want to point out
that automated transformations between two different formats is anything
but a piece of cake.  XSLT makes it easy to turn the process into code,
but figuring out the correct process can still be non-trivial.

When you have two formats that have different logical models, figuring
out how to map the models onto each other can get very difficult.  I'm
not sure how different Metacity's format is from SVG.  But everybody
always walks into these things thinking it will be trivial, and then
they find themselves in an endless process of changes and tweaks.  The
devil is *always* in the details.

--
Shaun