Re: SVG - what were they smoking?

[Corion]

I see this as an example of Conway's Law - you have one team thinking about a document, and one team thinking about turtle-graphics. Of course, they will create something where changes in the document structure don't affect the turtle-graphics-people, and changes in the turtle graphic part don't affect the document people.

My favourite abuse of XML is the MOSMIX format (pdf), which is a KML dialect with fixed-width additional weather data. The justifications to me are that the fixed-width data already existed from older formats and that wrapping each column in additional XML would have bloated the (uncompressed) file size a lot. But still, it's a funny abuse:

<kml:Placemark> <!--Beginn einer Vorhersage für einen Punkt -->
<kml:name>01025</kml:name> <!--Stations-ID -->
<kml:description>TROMSOE</kml:description> <!--Stations Name -->
<kml:ExtendedData> <!--Hier beginnt die Vorhersage der einzelnen Groes
+sen -->
<dwd:Forecast dwd:elementName="TTT"><dwd:value> 272.35 272.45 272.55 2
+72.85</dwd:value></dwd:Forecast> <!--Eine Vorhersagegroesse-->

Other than the format, the data feed is nicely stable and works with Weather::MOSMIX for six years without changes already.

[afoken]

I see this as an example of Conway's Law - you have one team thinking about a document, and one team thinking about turtle-graphics.

Probably. Maybe the turtle graphic "modem command language" already existed when SVG was designed, and was simply reused? That's the only way the spec of the SVG path element makes any sense to me. If you "think in XML" and want to specify a vector graphics format from scratch, you would use XML nodes for path elements, not string fragments.

Alexander