User:John Bessa

I used Inkscape to create two social-structure maps, one of which is on ConstrucTIVism, the organizational science behind the current information society (the internet), as well as the epistemology for natural, non-forced, community- and family-based learning. The other was a genogram, which I cannot post as it has private family data, that even the whole family does not know about!

These maps were so successful, that I cannot imagine making web pages any other way. The W3 has specified that SVG be able to embed regular HTML, which suggests that everything from scroll bars to CSS boxes will eventually be part of SVG.

My immediate need is for "rich text format," which is really font size, bullets and numerals, left-middle-right positioning, etc--nothing too complicated. Spell check we already have!

This is the future, and seeing it is so grand, I am thinking that Inkscape should evolve into a kit to build editors, rather than a specific editor. What I have found is that certain features have been "evoked" unintentionally by my novice fingers, such as the thickening of lines; so, certain features might want to be "masked" but not eliminated.

I knew that Inkscape would "be on my side" with respect to object control, and I was not disappointed. But it I think it can, and perhaps should, go forward.

I see three objective terms:

• properties
• metadata
• attributes

(Actually I didn't see attributes, but they are an, if not the, important object-oriented "tag.")

I think that these need to be differentiated carefully, and that these three be brought up with a right click on every object -- an object map, with all these three accessible as an independent workspace -- a fully redundant system where structure is uniformly defined (to be accessed in many ways) from top to bottom based on these three, (as I can tell so far). What I am saying is that by creating intuitive and increasingly granular structures, any body can figure out how to get from "here to there." This is not as it is now, for instance, because a right click brings up an un-intuitive box that talks about things no average person could possibly grok. Those boxes would be "specialized" in this approach of mine, and would not be eliminated, but masked to be produced at the will of the user to become the "intuitive" high level.

Following this approach, plugins can be added that would not fight for space in the "default" screen, but would be accessed in ways that are tutorial, help-oriented, and properly constructed. Some of these plug-ins should be algorithms that determine what "button" get precedence within the individual (or task-specialized) rendition of Inkscape.

Just a few thoughts... I hope they help.--John Bessa 16:18, 28 December 2011 (UTC)