Comment by jaffathecake

Team and driver for in 2026?

I am always on Team Hamilton even though I appreciate that he is a little long in the tooth and doing the classic retirement act in a 'stupid red car'.

I am obsessed with SVG and image compression/delivery, and I would like it if you could introduce the concept of an 'SVG sampler' to the world. This is very much inspired by embroidery samplers from the times when women needed to sew.

The point of the sampler is to impress, so as to get the work in, however, it is also a reference, with stitches to copy for lettering, numbers, religious iconography, sock-darning, button-holes and whatever else needs to be repeated.

With an SVG sampler the idea is to use the whole SVG toolkit, filters, masks, clip paths, symbols, views, SMIL, CSS and everything else.

Sure this can be done in Inkscape, however, the goal of the SVG sampler is to make it human drawable. For example, the search icon is a circle and a line, which can be done in a 45Kb export from Illustrator, with the circle defined as a thousand points, specified to NASA numbers.

Or it can be done in ten lines or so of SVG primitives, with the circle and the line using simple two-digit integers. The former is not something that a mere mortal could draw, whereas the latter could be.

Clearly some paths do need to be complex and imported from elsewhere.

SVGOMG will be able to mash the 45Kb Illustrator export into a tenth the size, however, it will not be as concise or as human readable as the 'haiku of the SVG sampler symbol'.

The SVG sampler does not have to be web-optimised, it can max out the CPU for the PC to go full China Syndrome and melt its way through your desk. However, it could be forked, culled of CPU-eater show-stoppers, to just have the icons needed for the next project.

Another way of seeing the SVG sampler idea is 'SVG golf', where you want to strive for maximal 'use' clones, maximal human readability, yet also an insistence on detail such as light/dark mode currentColor things, animating pretty much everything and using the primitives rather than paths, even if the code is longererer according to SVGOMG.

I think that SVG falls within an awkward gap where artworkers don't care for the code with programmers also not caring for the code, because SVG is artworker stuff, not for programmers, right?

In a typical team workflow there is no scope for this to change, the frontend developer is obligated to use the 'assets' churned out by the art worker and the backend developer certainly doesn't care.

Hence, an SVG 'sampler' competition of sorts, with some acknowledgement, could help Firefox win over some developer mindset to FF. Already MDN has the de-facto best documentation for SVG, I probably have a dozen MDN tabs open right now, maybe with all of them on some type of FEconvolve type of feature.

For the sampler, the IDE rather than the graphics program is how it works. Anything with 'sodipodi' type of extra markup can be considered not worthy of being an SVG sampler. Really it has to be a mostly text-only thing, under version control, and not needing CodePen or other. To go with the SVG there needs to be a 'sampler.html' file to show the sampler symbols in 'inline mode' as well as CSS, the favicon and as shown as an 'image' element. Scripting is allowed, but really the goal is to keep everything in the SVG file, to not need huge amounts of extra files.

Ideally comments outside of 'title' and 'description' should not be needed, the author should be able to explain their own code, hence an emphasis on 'defs', sensible id names and descriptive ids.

Since F1 is your thing, you are welcome to give the SVG sampler idea a F1 inspired ethos to it. If you think of the FW14C with the active suspension and whatnot, or the F-duct, DAS and other wonders, then applied that design rigour to SVG, think how good it could be. Added marks for everything good looking, however, there needs to be this solid human-readable underpinnings.

Please do something for SVG at Firefox, to inspire people to get into it rather than assume it is someone else's job. Maybe just have a competition, no prizes needed, with folks able to vote on awesomeness, sophistication, haiku-esque simplicity and how educational a given sampler is.

I see no reason why you can't call yourself 'uncle Bernie', to cosplay as the benevolent dictator that gives out a star prize for an SVG sampler (every time there is an F1 race, rather than monthly, as that would be tedious).

As for AI, Google suggest does offer up SVG code that never works, it gets a duff namespace declaration on line one, dooming any of its concoctions to never open. But where we are going with 'SVG samplers', we don't need no AI robots.