Creating SVG shape elements

What would be the benefit of using "real" shapes? One
disadvntage is that you can't put text on path for an ellipse.

Inkscape used to have those but changed to the current
solution (don't remember the exact reason)

I'm the author of the request.

> What would be the benefit of using "real" shapes?

Well, first of all, the "fully compliant with SVG", as we can
read on Inkscape's website home page.

Secondly, it's more interesting and very powerfull to use
various markups in a development way (i.e. with xhtml). Let's
say you want to match all the <circle> elements of a page (to
interact with xhtml for ex.) ?
If you only have <path> it's rather difficult :-(

> One disadvntage is that you can't put text on path for an
ellipse

Well, probably for the moment, but, let's say you want to
create a shape :
- first you draw a circle (if you don't alterate the shape =
<circle>);
- then you want to transform it to an ellipse (it become an
<ellipse>);
- then if you transform it more, it becomes a <path>.

Another benefit :
With CSS, if you want to style all the <circle> elements, it's
very easy!
circle{ blabla }

I tried it with Ilustrator and edited the document with Inkscape.
The transformations works very well in this way.

emmanuelc wrote:
>> nicubunu wrote:
>> What would be the benefit of using "real" shapes?
>
> Well, first of all, the "fully compliant with SVG", as we can
> read on Inkscape's website home page.

Inkscape will read SVG files containing <circle> and
<ellipse> and the <path> it saves are SVG compliant, so the
home page is right on this one.

I get your point about styling certain type of shapes and
using the markup in external scripts and find some merit
into it.

I guess you'll have to dig in the mailing list archive to
find exactly why paths were prefered