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SVG Working Group specifications
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[svg-native] "SVG Native" isn't a great name #667

Open litherum opened 5 years ago

litherum commented 5 years ago

Other contenders:

lemzwerg commented 5 years ago

I like "Encapsulated SVG", which could be abbreviated to "ESVG" – "Embedded SVG" would have the same abbreviation, and given its use in fonts, this is not bad either.

AmeliaBR commented 5 years ago

"encapsulated" is an established term in the context of "encapsulated PostScript" (.eps) documents.

Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on how closely our goals for this format match with the restrictions on EPS.

I'm not an expert on the distinctions between EPS and full PostScript, so I turned to Wikipedia, which offers the following summary:

Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) is a DSC-conforming PostScript document with additional restrictions which is intended to be usable as a graphics file format. In other words, EPS files are more-or-less self-contained, reasonably predictable PostScript documents that describe an image or drawing and can be placed within another PostScript document. Simply, an EPS file is a PostScript program, saved as a single file that includes a low-resolution preview "encapsulated" inside of it, allowing some programs to display a preview on the screen.

The first two sentences almost directly describe what we want for this format. So far, so good. But if the word "encapsulated" is supposed to refer to the pre-rasterized thumbnail encapsulated inside the vector file, that's a conflict. We're definitely not talking about doing that.

So, the question is: do most designers know that the "encapsulated" part of EPS is the embedded thumbnail? Or has usage shifted enough from the original name that people just understand "encapsulated" to mean "self-contained image file"?

jarek-foksa commented 5 years ago

It would be more convenient to have a short format name which is an acronym (e.g. "ESVG") and a long descriptive name which expands the acronym (e.g. "Encapsulated Scalable Vector Graphics"). "Encapsulated SVG" is neither short nor descriptive.

I suspect that most designers don't even know what EPS stands for. I can't even tell what PNG and JPEG stand for without checking the Wikipedia. I find the term "encapsulated" most suitable for inclusion in the name because it does not already appear in the spec to define some other unrelated concepts.

jarek-foksa commented 5 years ago

Another name idea is "PSVG" which would stand for "Portable Scalable Vector Graphics". This name would be consistent with other established web formats: "PNG" which stands for "Portable Network Graphics" and "PDF" which stands for "Portable Document Format".

Alternatively make it even shorter: "PVG" ("Portable Vector Graphics").

svgeesus commented 5 years ago

So, the question is: do most designers know that the "encapsulated" part of EPS is the embedded thumbnail? Or has usage shifted enough from the original name that people just understand "encapsulated" to mean "self-contained image file"?

Remembering back a few decades, when I used to write EPS diagrams (by hand, in a text editor) the main differences were:

A raster preview could be provided but was always, as I saw it, optional. Since

a) I was working in a text editor, making a raster preview would have been annoying; and b) I was editing on an X11R3 system with Display Postscript, so the raster preview would not have been used anyway.

So I never added one to my files.

Thus, I think ESVG ("Encapsulated Scalable Vector Graphics") would be a fine name.