Re: Dia2, SVG, XMI, Dublin Core, aw hell just look at OO.o [RE: RE: RE: SVG support]

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Alan Horkan wrote:
> One of my problems with the dia file is that in effect it is just a list
> of objects.  It might be possible to reinterpret this as SMIL.

It isn't, quite.  There's also groups and connection handling.  Don't know
what SMIL is, though.

> While messing about with Dia and having renamed some of my shapes i found
> that old save files would spew a s---load of not found errors and not
> display anything useful.  Imagine what would happen if we had thousands
> of shapes but did not ship with all of them.  Document exchange and
> portability is a nightmare.  It would be nice if the save format was more
> robust and the SVG was inlined into the actual Dia file so that if hte
> object as unavailable at least there would be a placeholder image to
> display instead.

Inlining SVG for shapes should be an option if not the default.

> I really dont like the programmed objects, it would not be so bad if they
> were SVG for the visual parts.  Binary file formats, ick.  Mixed and
> matched XML with Binary is even worse.

While programmed objects would find it difficult to use SVG internally, it
would certainly be an option to have them output an SVG representation to
use if the object itself isn't found.  Would increase file size a bit,
though, as some things get a double representation.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| HÃrdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?