[Clipart] Ideas for the clipart project.

[Alan Horkan]

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, [iso-8859-1] Áki G Karlsson wrote:

> Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 13:05:44 -0000
> From: "[iso-8859-1] Áki G Karlsson" <aki at akademia.is>
> To: Clipart at freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: [Clipart] Ideas for the clipart project.
>
> Hi
>
> Inevitable that this comes up sooner or later...
> Was there any discussion about animated clipart previously? SVG supports
> animation, obviously, and there might be a conversion utility for SVG->MNG
> or similar...
>
> I'm no great fan of animated (looped) clipart, personally, but it is
> something that a lot of people covet... (e.g. listed under "cool stuff" at
> clipart sites) so this question is bound to come up: What will be the
> project's policy on animation?

so far I believe that SMIL would be the best way to animate SVG although
manipulating the DOM using javascript is also possible it seems messier.

given the inclusiveness this project wants to have then I'm sure that
animated clipart would be accepted, only the problem of homogenising and
standardising on a base file format may be a little more complex.

(Dare I mention Flash?  It is and has been for a several years an open
format and I wouldn't be surprised if some artists were willing to put
some of their flash animations into the public domain but I wonder if we
can actually do very much with it as there seem to be very few free tools
available.)

> Topic ideas: I suggested "country outlines" previously as a topic... Do
> you think it's a bad idea? It would certainly be useful for me myself... :)

I certainly think it is a good idea, my only resevation is about how
difficult it might prove to be.  (And it would be particularly impessive
if the pieces (countries) could be easily fit together like a puzzle
(into a continent).  If you get good public domain images to work off I
think there are some tricks we could do using Postscript (print to file)
and then converting that to SVG (I've seen some reasonably good results
from other people converting postscript vectors to svg paths).

Sincerley

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/