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Comment by ognarb | Hacker News Reader

You clearly didn't understand how the path element in SVG works. The M, L and other characters contains valuable information. M stand for move, L for trace a line, but you can also have instructions for bezier curve or Z for closing a path. Your json format by removing this information is useless.

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I believe something like this would work (excuse the comments normally not allowed in JSON):

    {
      paths: [
        {
          points: [
            [10, 10],  // 0
            [90, 10],  // 1
            [90, 90],  // 2
            [10, 90]   // 3
          ],
          lines: [
            [0, 1, 2, 3, 0]  // connect point 0 to 1 to 2 to (...)
          ],
          curves: {
            0: [5, 15, 15, 5]  // bezier control points for point 0 (x1, y1, x2, y2)
          }
        }
      ]
    }

The downside (other than the bloat) would be when writing the code by hand, you'd have to keep track of the indices in the `points` array.

i'd much rather have

    [ { line: [10, 10] }, { cubic: [ 5, 15, 15, 5 ] }, ... ]

or even

    [ ["line", 10, 10], ["cubic", ...], ... ]

- anything as long as there's a way to stream the data (which is not possible with your format as you need to receive the whole object before being able to do anything).

this makes me realize that xml maps relatively well to JSON array whose elements are object with 1 fields (or 2 fields) whose value is again a similar array.

> You clearly didn't understand how the path element in SVG works.

No, I didn't. I was working from the parent's code. I don't appreciate your attitude though. There's much nicer ways to correct people online.

While there's truth in this, it's irrelevant to their point which was:

> No need for the x and y, really

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