[Clipart] Does openclipart.org have invalid SVG content?

[Alan Horkan]

On Sun, 8 Oct 2006, Dan Gerhards wrote:

> Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 00:34:27 -0700
> From: Dan Gerhards <dan at seansastronomyshop.com>
> To: clipart at lists.freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: [Clipart] Does openclipart.org have  invalid SVG content?
>
> > I'd like to add to add a note to the guidelines about saving for "best
> > compatibility", which really means telling Inkscape users to save as
> > "Plain SVG".
>
> Why?

Why not!

Both Inkscape and OpenClipart are about promoting the SVG standard, rather
than just using the standard as a means to an end (sodipodi).  I dislike
vendor lock in no matter the vendor, and pushing all these optional extra
is contrary to promoting the standard.  In some cases they need to be
pushed upstream and included in the next generation of the standard.

Would we not cry foul if people started submitting lots of files with
Adobe extensions?  We can already predict the problems of images embedded
in SVG files, which Adobe does a whole lot of because so many of their
advanced features cannot adequately be represented in SVG.  (Adobe has
lots of custom extensions to SVG but they too see the merit in promoting
wider standards like XMP.)

> If you use another program, it will ignore the extra tags.

(If you are lucky, and if those programs restrain themselves to only
non-visual extensions that do not prevent other programs from rendering
the file correctly.)

Different goals.  Those extra tags aren't incompatible with promoting the
SVG standard and acceptable in small does but it isn't something we should
be promoting too much either.

It probably sounds like I am making a bigger deal of this than I should
but for me OpenClipart is as much or more about promoting the SVG standard
than it is about providing clipart.  (Still it isn't a very big deal in
the scheme of things, my writing just tends to sound emphatic when talking
about standards.)

-- 
Alan