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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

They don't care. Designers don't care that you can code SVG manually yourself. They use Illustrator because it is the best software to do what they want. You need to respect that this is how designers work if you want to be taken seriously by designers--and that's step one of changing anything.

If it requires a text editor, you just lost 95% of designers (conservative guess) and you won't get them back because you've shown that you don't respect how they work.

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No need to require a text editor to create SVG icons, just use Inkscape http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/inkscape-0-48-revie... and then add your work to openclipart.org

No doubt Illustrator is capable of exporting to SVG, and that is really an essential for any sort of web icons in the HTML5 age.

Illustrator and related formats - EPS, AI - are considerably more featureful than SVG supports. They are able to mash their documents down to SVG, at the cost of losing data. Which nobody will do for raws.

And, as is so common with open-source attempts at graphics software, nobody takes Inkscape seriously. Sorry.

I don't say that designers should program instead of using their tools. What I say is: Stop the craziness of 50 different projects which give you some set of icons. Each a little different but each repeating things over and over again. Let's define one framework and go from their and satisfy 95% of all projects.

So another standard for the next project to ignore in favor of creating a new standard?

Hmm.

I'd use an existing programming language (asymptote or scala) and build a framework to create a bunch of EPS/PNG/SVG icons.

No new file format....

This is what I mean with DSL:

http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/doc/Tutorial.html#Tutorial

And who, among the people who actually design and build icons, would care?

Hint: they use Illustrator. They're going to keep using Illustrator. They're not going to stop using Illustrator so you can have a marginally easier Github workflow.

Let's stop the craziness of 50 different programming languages which all bundle slightly different sets of features. Can't we just put all the features in one language?

The reason to use one icon set on a web page is that the icons look good together. Putting a bunch of different icon styles in one set defeats this. A good designer has the skills to bust out Sketch and make another icon in the same style if they need it, and then contribute it back to the set for consideration.

If you're not able to do this, there's always http://icomoon.io/app/ which lets you bundle icons from different sets into one font.

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