Imagine for a moment:
- Joe User knows nothing about the SVG format other than it's an image format.
- Starts a new document in Inkscape
- Imports a raster image (PNG) from the hard drive
- Saves image as SVG
- Uploads the SVG file to a clip art website
- Is baffled why the image displays fine on his computer in the browser but is blank for everyone else
Yes this could really happen. So how do we fix it?
- Warn during Import stage of local references?
- Warn during Save stage of local references?
- Embed raster as a data: url in the SVG source (breaking link with local file)?
4. Make analog of MHTML file format for SVG?
@Anonymous: Though this is an interesting idea, I’m really looking for solutions that would help existing implementations and the existing spec. Starting something new would either be specific to Inkscape (the opposite of interoperable) or takes years to standardize and deploy. On the other hand, data: URLs work today and are a means to achieve “MHTML” today interoperably (though base64-encoding the raster is not optimal).
5. Use relative URL in SVG and allow multifile upload on clip art website? Open and save to directories instead of files in Inkscape? Will Inkscape use standart windows open and save dialogs?
6. Warn after upload on clip art website?
BTW, i now try to update inkscape from old version to 0.46 on windows, and after automatic uninstalling previus version “uninst.exe” was not deleted; 0.46 installer warn me about not empty directory, and after manual deleting whole directory (my mistake) installer cannot to write “inkscape.exe”. Is it bug?
If you find something, could you tell us over at Wikipedia? We are dealing with uploaders complaining about this at least once a week.
In addition, the Wikimedia renderer installation disables external references completely, because it would be a security threat – and path-handling in a multi-million-file enviroment would be a nightmare: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3537
Another (smaller) problem here is that a newbie author may not know that the raster was not really converted to an SVG, and think that because the image is now an “SVG”, it has all the features of SVG (scalability, small size for line art, editability, and whatnot).
FYI, I have finally opened Bug 366993 against Inkscape for this issue.