Re: gEDA-user: web version of gschem/pcb

[Andrew Poelstra <asp11@xxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 10:42:45AM -0700, Josh Jordan wrote:
>     I think it would be a big advance to port the gschem/pcb formats to
>     javascript and svg.  It would make geda accessible to every platform
>     and really make it easy for new users to get started.  It would make
>     development easier if you only support a set of standards instead of
>     different build environments that overall run on a minority of the
>     systems out there.  Javascript and SVG with local data can perform as
>     well as any desktop application in 2d graphics.
>     -Josh Jordan

SVG is hard to read, hard to diff, hard to parse and hard to validate.
It's not something we would want geda/pcb core to care about. What
happens when people open pcbs in inkscape and draw gradients, filters,
links, animation, etc?

How would ideas like DRC rules, electrical attributes, netlists and
pin mappings translate to/be preserved by browsers and SVG editors?

Importing and exporting to (a limited subset of) SVG would be very
cool. I don't mean to discourage people from exploring this. But I
doubt very much that full functionality could be achieved from a svg-
based webui.

Looking far into the future, a nice path would be:

  1. Figure out how we want to handle symbols and layers and the
     other ugly parts of the current file formats.
  2. Move pcb and gschem to appropriate (extensible) file formats
     like xml/yaml/sexprs/whatever.
  3. Get a javascript parser -for these formats-
  4. Build a web-based system that works with gEDA.

-- 
Andrew Poelstra
Email: asp11 at sfu.ca OR apoelstra at wpsoftware.net
Web:   http://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew/



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