This is an interesting project, for sure, but it's also kind of extraneous. From their overview: SVG actually fulfills all of those roles since it is literally made up of plain text, and most...
This is an interesting project, for sure, but it's also kind of extraneous. From their overview:
Typograms optimizes for editability and portability (e.g. plain text is easy to maintain, change, store and transmit), at the cost of expressivity (e.g. SVG is more expressive) and ergonomics (e.g. higher level tools produce diagrams faster).
SVG actually fulfills all of those roles since it is literally made up of plain text, and most diagramming tools that I'm aware of will export it natively. So unless I intend the document I'm writing to be displayable on devices that are not capable of high-quality graphics or has no graphics capabilities at all, there is no reason to use this.
It seems really weird to me that this is something that came out of Google.
I think the point may be that svgs are not necessarily very human readable and/or editable, while these are more or less just ascii art. I think its a neat little experiment.
I think the point may be that svgs are not necessarily very human readable and/or editable, while these are more or less just ascii art. I think its a neat little experiment.
If you're talking about the source file being human readable, it kind of already is since it's XML, and doesn't have any weird encoding or compression on it. You can even label each individual tag...
If you're talking about the source file being human readable, it kind of already is since it's XML, and doesn't have any weird encoding or compression on it. You can even label each individual tag on it manually if you prefer, and even add comments. But it's also kind of irrelevant since no end-user is going to be reading the source, they're going to be looking at the rendered end product. And as far as editability, there are many tools that can assist with it, or you can manually edit the XML in any text editor.
Like I said, the project is neat, it's just redundant. That's why I thought it was weird that Google is releasing it. There's nothing wrong with having more than one way to do something.
It seems to me that this is to SVG as Markdown is to HTML. HTML is also human read/writable in a text editor, but verbose and not AS human readable. If your goal is to quickly write a document or...
It seems to me that this is to SVG as Markdown is to HTML. HTML is also human read/writable in a text editor, but verbose and not AS human readable. If your goal is to quickly write a document or a diagram in plain text with nothing more than e.g. vim, I can see the benefit to this. XML can be a pain to work with.
That said, I plan to just use SVG with higher level editing tools for my next diagram. Maybe I'll try this out at some point though. It does seem neat.
This seems... worse than all the alternatives? SVG or Mermaid or Graphviz could do all these things better. The only thing this seems to have going for it is that you can do ASCII art in a text...
This seems... worse than all the alternatives? SVG or Mermaid or Graphviz could do all these things better. The only thing this seems to have going for it is that you can do ASCII art in a text editor, which is the most obnoxiously manual way to make diagrams. (They call this "expressivity", which is almost the opposite of how I would use that word.)
I especially like the circuit diagram where they drew a BJT with a right-pointing triangular arrow, but it's not actually clear without looking up the part number whether it's NPN (the arrow should be rotated to point diagonally downward) or PNP (with the top left corner of the arrow representing the tip).
Think you could do it with what they've got, but it would be nice to have something purpose built. This looks really interesting and certainly worth toying with.
Think you could do it with what they've got, but it would be nice to have something purpose built. This looks really interesting and certainly worth toying with.
Yeah totally. Be good for Git or something when you've got Infra as code. Just the connectors and a generic approach would be huge. Rather than spending £££ on modelling tools and /or Lucid
Yeah totally. Be good for Git or something when you've got Infra as code.
Just the connectors and a generic approach would be huge. Rather than spending £££ on modelling tools and /or Lucid
This is an interesting project, for sure, but it's also kind of extraneous. From their overview:
SVG actually fulfills all of those roles since it is literally made up of plain text, and most diagramming tools that I'm aware of will export it natively. So unless I intend the document I'm writing to be displayable on devices that are not capable of high-quality graphics or has no graphics capabilities at all, there is no reason to use this.
It seems really weird to me that this is something that came out of Google.
I think the point may be that svgs are not necessarily very human readable and/or editable, while these are more or less just ascii art. I think its a neat little experiment.
If you're talking about the source file being human readable, it kind of already is since it's XML, and doesn't have any weird encoding or compression on it. You can even label each individual tag on it manually if you prefer, and even add comments. But it's also kind of irrelevant since no end-user is going to be reading the source, they're going to be looking at the rendered end product. And as far as editability, there are many tools that can assist with it, or you can manually edit the XML in any text editor.
Like I said, the project is neat, it's just redundant. That's why I thought it was weird that Google is releasing it. There's nothing wrong with having more than one way to do something.
It seems to me that this is to SVG as Markdown is to HTML. HTML is also human read/writable in a text editor, but verbose and not AS human readable. If your goal is to quickly write a document or a diagram in plain text with nothing more than e.g. vim, I can see the benefit to this. XML can be a pain to work with.
That said, I plan to just use SVG with higher level editing tools for my next diagram. Maybe I'll try this out at some point though. It does seem neat.
I can see it being used with documents that are meant to be consumed primarily as text files, like in-code documentation and RFCs.
This seems... worse than all the alternatives? SVG or Mermaid or Graphviz could do all these things better. The only thing this seems to have going for it is that you can do ASCII art in a text editor, which is the most obnoxiously manual way to make diagrams. (They call this "expressivity", which is almost the opposite of how I would use that word.)
I especially like the circuit diagram where they drew a BJT with a right-pointing triangular arrow, but it's not actually clear without looking up the part number whether it's NPN (the arrow should be rotated to point diagonally downward) or PNP (with the top left corner of the arrow representing the tip).
Only thing missing is a good relational database set.
DEPLOY THE ERD!
Think you could do it with what they've got, but it would be nice to have something purpose built. This looks really interesting and certainly worth toying with.
Yeah totally. Be good for Git or something when you've got Infra as code.
Just the connectors and a generic approach would be huge. Rather than spending £££ on modelling tools and /or Lucid