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(I apologize if this belongs in stackexchange.com - I'm not sure how to tell)

I am a big fan of the dot language and want to adopt a language for my more complex diagramming needs (e.g. software architecture graphics, business school papers, personal notes etc.) and want something that is a good compromise on these:

1) Relatively easy to read and understand (like dot), and not too verbose. So far my research has shown that there is no clear favorite.

2) Easy to tweak by hand (i.e. in a text editor). The initial drawing can be done in a graphics package but if you just want to change some text or a color, it should be easy to do with plain text *NIX tools. So that rules out Flash.

3) It won't fall out of favor one day and risk being a waste of effort and I'd need to migrate my diagrams to some other format.

I'm put off by Metapost because it looks complicated, but I'm not sure if SVG is being obsoleted and Adobe are putting all their investment into Flash.

Sridhar Sarnobat
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    The question belongs probably more to http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ but since SVG is a W3C standard which is endorsed by recent browsers I would say that yes. – Basile Starynkevitch Jan 02 '12 at 07:05

3 Answers3

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1) Relatively easy to read and understand (like dot), and not too verbose. So far my research has shown that there is no clear favorite.

dot's more high-level than SVG is; last I checked, SVG was one of dot's output formats.

2) Easy to tweak by hand (i.e. in a text editor). The initial drawing can be done in a graphics package but if you just want to change some text or a color, it should be easy to do with plain text *NIX tools.

Handwritten SVG is fairly easy to edit in a text editor, much like handwritten HTML.

Computer-generated SVG is fairly irritating to edit in a text editor, much like Word-generated HTML.

3) It won't fall out of favor one day and risk being a waste of effort and I'd need to migrate my diagrams to some other format.

All current browsers have SVG support, including IE.. As far as I can tell, SVG is a relatively safe graphics format to write in.

I'm put off by Metapost because it looks complicated, but I'm not sure if SVG is being obsoleted and Adobe are putting all their investment into Flash.

Adobe's interest is fairly irrelevant at this point. You may be thinking of a time when Adobe's SVG plugin was the only way to view SVG, but those days are long gone (and the plugin is defunct). These days, SVG is fairly well supported in browsers, at least for static images. Additionally, the SVG-related technologies that browsers support has been steadily increasing in all browsers over the past few years (it's a complex spec), and I see no reason why SVG support would stall or reverse.

adiabatic
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  • Thank you for the comments adiabatic. particularly the Adobe part which really bothered me until now. I'm just itching for some working drafts to be published (e.g. SVGParamPrimer, SVGConnector). – Sridhar Sarnobat Jan 02 '12 at 08:38
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SVG has been a W3C recommendation since 2001 and modern browsers have supported it for years, IE recently joined in. As of now all major browser vendors are working in the direction of expanding their support.

Alot of info can be found here: http://caniuse.com/#cats=SVG

bennedich
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As far as I know SVG is a feature of HTML 5. So,if you use SVG there is a chance that it will not work in some old browsers. But, I think the world(all browsers) is moving to HTML 5.

HasanCseBuet
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