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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

(Warning: bit of a tangent)

Conceptually, I love this.

Mainly because for some reason it irritates me than screenshots are bitmaps.

Nearly everything in a user interface or document is vector-based, except for photographs and natural-media illustrations.

The ability to capture part of a webpage as an SVG feels like a step forwards in preserving vector content.

My real wish is that OS interfaces would be just as vector-based, where rendering to bitmap was just something the OS handled at the end. So a screenshot in macOS or Windows would similarly always be SVG.

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I also wished that was true while working on a fast web-based remote desktop client. Imagine if instead of a video stream via VNC, the UI was HTML or SVG diffs. That would be really fast! RDP does something similar but on a much lower-level.

Yes! IIRC, RDP was originally based on simply sending over the GDI calls -- the Windows draw instructions -- directly.

I've been told it moved away from that as networks got faster, interfaces became more GPU-accelerated, and video encoding became hardware-accelerated, so that now it's not much different from VNC. But I don't know when or to what extent, or if RDP still uses any draw instructions at all.

RDP most likely uses privileged instrumentation to detect screen damage, rather than having to do a full framebuffer scan (or getting framebuffer damage bounds) to identify diffs.

Modern RDP can use hardware h.264 encoding if your GPU supports it, and grabs the output from the framebuffer and streams it like a game streaming app does. I think the default RDP mode still sends the draw commands the old-fashioned way though.

There was a tool called radmin back in the [days before it was heavily commercialized then ruined] that still to this day is the absolute fastest remote desktop setup I’ve ever used. I’d be surprised if it was more than 20ms + network latency.

I suspect that it transferred OS calls.

But even then, that would pale in comparison to SVG diffs from an SVG-native OS.

Yes! Rasters are really portable and convenient and reliably consistent. But it irks me when I have to use rasters. I want vectors everywhere. Generated everything! Quantize it at the very last minute.

Firefox has built-in screenshot support, with the ability to capture just a piece of the screen. How difficult really would it be to save as svg?

macOS used to produce pdf files for screenshots long ago. They switched to pngs, probably because those are easier to share.

PNGs are better for screenshots in most cases both for sharing and for working with the images. The PDFs that Mac OS were generating were a PDF wrapper around a raster screenshot. You can configure the screenshot utility to save in PNG, JPEG, PDF, or TIFF. You can also configure it to save the files to a folder like ~\Pictures\Screenshots instead of dumping them on the desktop.

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