Many of you are familiar with the <replicate> proposal [1,2] that the SVG Working Group has been considering.
It is an effort to add declarative drawing (patterned after SVG <animate>) to SVG. There is news. a) The Working Group recently decided [3] not to adopt <replicate>, unless it is accompanied by "concrete use cases and demonstration of author/implementor interest." b) Eric Elder and I are contemplating expanding the scope of the open source project [4]; it is a small JavaScript program that basically interpolates between values of a variety of attributes, and then adds things to the DOM accordingly. Part A. I'm interested in seeing if other people know about it, and are interested in it, and better yet, if you have used it. To pique your interest take a look at these things: http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/pathRep2JS.svg -- use two curves to define four attributes of an extruded shape. http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/pathRep1JS.svg To reply to the Working Group, I'd like to assemble some sort of a response. Finding that people are using it would be nice (I have gotten the occasional question about it, but have no systematic way of knowing). Finding out if people are intending to use it would be nice. Helping to emumerate use cases would be another good thing. Thus far, I'm thinking of the following use cases, * 3D text effects (e.g. http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/twist1.svg ) * Simulated rotation (like the spinning top at http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/SVGOpen2010/demo9.svg or http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/text/replicatePath9.svg ) * Generation of active grids (as for game boards) * Perspective tiling Perspective drawing (as in scenes) http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/replicate/repRectsGrad2g.svg or http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/replicate/repFilter1.2.svg * 3D drawing packages (as in http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/pathRep2JS.svg) * Rich gradients (perhaps we should de-emphasize this in recognition of the WG's decision to go with gradient meshes.) * Quasi random backdrops (leaves, crowds, pebbles, etc) in which objects are replicated using declarative randomness. (see below) Part B. I'm also interested in incorporating "declarative randomness" - if one wants to generate a few hundred objects into the DOM, why not have them be pseudo random? Values of colors (R G and/or B and H S and/or B) , heights, widths, baseTurbulence, scale, cx, ry, transform/rotate, etc. would all be definable within selected ranges, with either fixed seeds (for repeatable scenes) or unseeded (as with JavaScript's Math.random() ) We've already worked out a fairly efficient algorithm (the first apparently) for generating random polygons [5] , so this would probably be bundled in as well. Use cases: leaves, pebbles, crowds of people, clouds (from feTurbulence with random baseFrequencies), etc. Lots of quasi random backdrops that one doesn't really want to take the time to draw, but which might be desirable for a) non-programming artists or b) machines that run SVG but not JavaScript. And, a perhaps more extensive idea: given that Microsoft has adopted the perspective that they will wait until user demand for declarative animation grows* (and some possible migration of such into CSS), we are considering expanding the scope of the code base for <replicate> to include <animate> as well. It would sort of be like taking on much of what SMILScript and FakeSMIL have done. The idea is that so long as we are already interpolating via JavaScript between a half zillion types of attribute values, why not just parse out <animate> and <animateMotion> tags as well? Might anyone want to help contribute to such an open source project? Dash off an email about this (davidDotdaileyAtsruDotedu) Cheers David [1] proposal - http://svgopen.org/2010/papers/46-A_proposal_for_adding_declarative_drawing_ to_SVG/index.html [2] examples - http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/SVGOpen2010/replicate.htm [3] http://www.w3.org/2011/10/28-svg-minutes.html [4] http://code.google.com/p/svg-replicate/ [5] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414592 <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414592&bnc=1> &bnc=1 *Emoji and Wikipedia seem to be plausible strategies for propagating animation. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [email protected] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
