[CREATE] [ORA spec] effects filters are incompletely specified

[Andrew Chadwick]

Is anyone actively writing or reading OpenRaster files with <filter> or
<compositefilter>? I'm asking because the sections purporting to define
them in the draft spec are very incomplete; too incomplete to develop
code against. We need examples of them, at the very least. The problem
sections are


http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/OpenRaster/Draft/EffectsSpecification

This might have been a very early working draft. My problems with this
as it stands are:

 * No examples given for any of the filters
 * Should it refer to SVG 1.2 these days?
 * Does not address the mathematics of the operations as promised
 * Unclear about whether SVG 1.1 syntax should be used or our own
   * If our own, does not specify, but perhaps it's the one defined in


http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/OpenRaster/Draft/LayersStack#filter_element

This looks in better shape, and could possibly be implemented, exact
details of the as-yet undefined filter operations permitting...

Personally I feel that the "composite" type and macro arguments is
*HUGE* overkill for the first real version of the spec, and should be
dropped entirely (given that it's incomplete and there are comments in
there calling for it to be reconsidered anyway). Not sure where
<compositefilter> crept in; it's not part of the openraster-standard
schema in git. The name's somewhat confusing as well :D

The output="data/path/to/file" notation seems like a smart idea for
app-specific filters. I wonder what the ramifications of it are for
developers, since it seems to require in-memory, ORA-aware structures
while editing.


If nobody's working on these, and there are no concrete implementations,
I'd like to demote them to proposals due to their current
incompleteness, taking them out of the core extensions and main layers
stack description pages. I think that's the fairest approach. At the
very least, some of it needs pruning.


-- 
Andrew Chadwick