[cairo] filters/image processing

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 10:54 -0400, MenTaLguY wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 19:12 -0700, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> > You're going to have to deal with this anyway, as some filters will be
> > more performant than others in a given browser.
> 
> Huh?  You mean, someone's not going to decide, "oh, feGaussianBlur is
> slow, I'll use feComponentTransfer instead?"  Isn't the desired visual
> result a more important criterion for choosing a filter effect?

It depends.

If someone's choosing a transition effect, and one effect is terribly
slow and another is very fast, you can see that might affect their
decision.

More likely, authors will have an effect in mind, try it in their
favourite browser, and if it's terribly slow, they'll just not bother.
Worse, they'll find that it works well, and then someone will try it in
a cairo-based browser and file bugs if it's slow...

Vlad suggested that browser vendors conspire to select a subset of SVG
filters that we agree to implement efficiently. That's a good idea but
we also need to agree to implement the rest inefficiently :-).

Rob