Delta 0 - SVG

SVG is the foundation for svgdx, and is not hidden away

Overview

The svgdx format is a superset of SVG. In that sense, any valid SVG is (in theory) already valid svgdx input, and being able to intersperse SVG with enhanced svgdx avoids providing too many limitations to svgdx. In theory, svgdx is at least as powerful as SVG - anything you can do in SVG, you can also do in svgdx. In practice there are various constraints¹ which limit what can be done, though even these are more about being able to use the enhancements svgdx provides together with some SVG features - it’s always possible to drop down to the lower level more widely if required.

SVG is XML

If the benefit of having svgdx be a superset of SVG is that it provides enormous flexibility, the biggest downside is that SVG is an XML document format. Personally I quite like XML, or at least find its model of a hierarchy of tagged elements, each of which may have arbitrary attributes - and it’s support for comments - compelling advantages over (for example) JSON. However, it is tedious to type, and the need to use XML entities for common characters such as &, <, > and quotes is frustrating.

For now svgdx is XML, though in future a non-XML syntax retaining equivalent semantics is a definite possibility.

Elements and Attributes

SVG is built on a number of element types, each of which is parameterized through element-specific attributes.

svgdx provides new element types as well as additional attributes and semantics for existing SVG elements.

1. for example the assumption that user-coordinates are used throughout. ↩