Serializing SVG

[bstro]

I'm looking for a way to serialize SVG. Related to elm/file#1

The app I’m using this for is pretty niche, so a lot of this might not make sense, but I’ll give it a go:

You can take a look at an early, in progress version at http://hexagra.ms/678978

Its an app for working with the ancient Chinese book of philosophy called the I Ching. The UI allows users to enter specific numbers that correlate with shapes that may be looked up in the book. I dynamically generate these shapes as SVG for display in the browser. However, I also want to allow users to download the SVG shapes to do whatever they’d like with (I use this feature myself for journaling purposes.) I currently use ports to accomplish this, but it’d be nice if I could keep everything in Elm by using elm/file's download function. The only missing piece of the puzzle appears to be the lack of ability to serialize SVG nodes.

This is admittedly a pretty niche use case, although it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine someone building some sort of vector image editor/creator, and wanting to allow users to download the SVG content they’ve created in the browser, which is what I thought the example from the elm/file documentation was describing, at least until I looked harder at the type signatures.

[evancz]

Thank you for the excellent explanation! I cannot promise a feature like this will get added, but it is really helpful to have your story!