The coming of SVG

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2017-11-08 23:02, Mike Kerner via use-livecode wrote:
> I was just reading an article, this morning, about the trainwreck of 
> new
> gestures to accommodate the X's lack of a home button, and I guess what 
> the
> author was saying is pretty much what I'm trying to say:  If it isn't
> obvious and easy, then it's wrong.  Keep the language on the level of 
> what
> a grade schooler would grasp and not forget.  If that means we chop 
> down
> several objects into the graphic object, and just add a "type" 
> property,
> then so be it.  Most of these other proposals don't keep it simple.

Indeed - this discussion has been most useful in working out the best 
approach here.

The main take home I've got from this thread is that my original idea of 
'picture' was not quite right I don't think - I had conflated two 
things:

   1) The idea of viewing

   2) The idea of definition

We already have a suitable abstraction for (1) - the image object - I'm 
going to re-investigate what it would take to allow the image object to 
reference an SVG file, or have the content of an SVG file set on it as 
the text. This would immediately give us icon and imageSrc references 
with no extra work.

In terms of (2), then I'm heavily leaning towards a 'canvas' control - 
which would essentially be a 'deferred' renderer for a list of 'vector' 
elements (i.e. the shape/image tags you find in SVG). This would wrap 
the LCB canvas abilities directly, which are a superset of the HTML5 
Canvas abilities. i.e. The Canvas control would be the LCS/xTalk-like 
reflection of the lower-level (immediate execution) Canvas abstractions 
(which is very xTalk-like).

In reality (2) needs a bit more design to get right (I've had a number 
of ideas I want to explore before committing to anything), where as we 
already have enough to do (1) usefully, so pragmatically going with (1) 
for right now seems to be the best short-term path.

Anyway, thanks to all of you for your input on this - I'm sure I'll be 
back on this topic in due course :)

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps