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Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but does anyone find the following bit of code readable?

SVG is a horrible way to do graphics, and not a good vector format due to its complexity. It's also difficult to get good performance, you'll eventually end up implementing stuff at a lower layer when SVG itself becomes a bottle-neck, and it has tons of cross-platform bugs that require endless debugging.

The crux of the matter is vectors are drawings, and may or may not have a hierarchical representation. It would be a lot better abstracted by a real language, using a primitive drawing API that allows you set debugger statements and the like to inspect state, variables, etc.

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Yes, this is a pretty readable code. I don't understand it deeply, but it's clear that it's a definition that defines some filter that I can call by its id.

What seems to be a hierarchy comes from the fact that this is a serialization of the data and the serialization has to be sequential and thus you cannot have a true graph here, only a tree with references. This would be true for any serialization format. Once you deserialize this into your internal format you can have back your graph and it can be as efficient as you'd like.

As a serialization format, however, it's very good, because it's based on a good standard. What's especially good about it is that you can see through its structure and access parts of it using the same generic API as with other XML-based formats. For example, in the browser you can style SVG with the same styling you use for HTML or script it with JavaScript.

Ah, Turing complete imperative languages...now that's a vector image format.

With sensible indentation, and knowing nothing of SVG, the only unreadable part of that is the blob of matrix data, but I'm very glad they didn't go with something like <matrixElement row="0" column="0">0.90</matrixElement><matrixElement row="0" col="1">0</matrixElement>...

I just looked, and apparently the matrix values can contain arbitrary whitespace including newlines, so even that's not a very strong criticism. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/feC...

Xml does not do it justice, but no way will json be any better. Creating a new format just for svg seems doomed. Whatever best suits it will have a huge battle against its adoption, especially in the browser implementations where it matters most.

Yes. I can understand that.

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