

Interacting with SVG - snupha
http://www.croscon.com/blog/interacting-with-svg/

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amelius
A couple of problems with SVG:

\- Difficult to really mix with HTML elements, like video (the example here is
kind of a border-case that works, but try for example clipping a video by a
non-rectangular path).

\- No hinting at smaller pixel-sizes, meaning that you'd need different SVGs
for different pixel-sizes in order for them to look pretty at small sizes.

~~~
j_m_b
> \- No hinting at smaller pixel-sizes, meaning that you'd need different SVGs
> for different pixel-sizes in order for them to look pretty at small sizes.

One always assumes that SVG is infinitely scalable. Thanks for brining up this
counterpoint. I guess "not everything is awesome".

~~~
pjc50
I'm still having trouble understanding why it isn't, and could do with an
example. Especially as pixel size isn't necessarily related to screen size.

~~~
pierrec
It is infinitely scalable. What amelius is saying is that there's no font
hinting at all ("at smaller pixel-sizes" probably meaning rather at small font
sizes, which is when you need hinting).

Hinting is a very complex operation (basically, you align letter's lines with
the pixels on the screen) which is only useful when the display's DPI is low
enough that you can see the pixels on the screen. SVG was never really
intended for these cases, it's rather intended for high-DPI, "next gen"
displays. However, I'm not sure if low DPI screens will ever go away. So will
SVG always have this "blurry text" problem?

Hinting would be a really cool feature to have but also very difficult to
implement gracefully. Usually hinting is done differently on every OS - by the
Freetype library on Linux, by ClearType on Windows, and not at all on OSX.
That kind of thing is difficult to incorporate into a standard - Do we accept
that it will look unpredictably different everywhere? Do we force every SVG
renderer to ship with freetype?

