[Clipart] [Fwd: [Open Clip Art Library 0000003]: SVG gradients don't render]

[Nicu Buculei]

i believe this bug report by Sven Neumann (from Gimp) is of interest for 
all of us who care about the gradients package.
i have not followed this closely back when it was discussed, so can't 
express a competent opinion.
what do you think?
i believe at least Alan will have some comments.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Open Clip Art Library 0000003]: SVG gradients don't render
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 02:31:21 +1000 (EST)


A BUGNOTE has been added to this bug.
======================================================================
http://www.openclipart.org/mantis/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000003
======================================================================
Reported By:                sven
Assigned To:
======================================================================
Date Submitted:             09-20-2004 10:25 PDT
Last Modified:              09-21-2004 09:31 PDT
======================================================================
Summary:                    SVG gradients don't render
Description:
The SVG gradient files distributed at Open Clip Art don't render anything.
This means that a file browser can't display a preview and it also means
that there's no preview on the website. With an SVG enabled browser the
gradient pages don't show any previews at all. This makes them unusable.
======================================================================

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  sven - 09-20-2004 10:33 PDT
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I have been under the impression that the previews on the website are empty
because my browser tries to render the SVG. After looking at the HTML
source, I know that this is not the case. The browser is displaying a PNG
file. This PNG preview has obviously been created by rendering the SVG.
Due to the problem reported here, this rendering is empty. The SVG file
contains nothing but an abstract gradient definition which is never
dereferenced.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  nicubunu - 09-21-2004 07:12 PDT
----------------------------------------------------------------------
see this message on our mailing list by the gradient package author, this
is by design:
http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/clipart/2004-July/000741.html

it may be useful to follow the entire thread

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  sven - 09-21-2004 09:31 PDT
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, come on. the web-page is completely useless without previews for the
gradients. This can hardly be intentional.

I followed the thread and it becomes obvious that these guys haven't even
read the SVG spec. The addition to the SVG file that is needed is trivial.
Just check the example from my first post. Then look at the example in the
SVG spec to verify that it is correct
(http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/images/pservers/lingrad01.svg).

All that fiddling with stops, that this long thread is about, is
completely unnecessary. It may be needed for the file to render in
Inkscape but this is only because Inkscape's SVG parser is broken (see
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1031486&group_id=93438&atid=604306).

Please, by all means, fix these gradients. I have put a considerable
effort into adding support for SVG gradients to The GIMP and I did so
because Alan asked me for it. Now Alan claims that the site is broken
intentionally? I can offer to write you a simple XSLT script to fix the
gradient files. Would you fix the SVG files if I did that?

-- 
nicu