There's a thing that has been giving me a hassle lately. The cel-shaded style I'm using involves thick outlines on images, and often has interior designs that are supposed to reach the outline, but not overlap it.

Here's an example of what I don't want, vs what I want. (ignore the fact that one outline is lighter than the other, it's the overlap I'm concerned with)



And the only way I can figure out how to implement it is by creating two objects and putting them right on top of each other. (along with whatever design I'm using)



Trouble is, this is a real pain to implement, especially if it has to go over/under other objects. And Editing it afterward is also a real problem. So I try to make really sure that's how I want it before I create the second object.

Is there a better way to do this?

((I apologize if this is a redundant question. I've found things that seem similar, but not quite the same as what I'm asking))

To my knowledge no, you cannot do that with the current svg format.
Svg is structured that the object you see on top is the nearest object to the top row in the xml codes of the file.
In other words, there is no other way to define compositing of the z order of each object's parts.

With the current structure, you define the stroke and the fill next to eachother at each object in the lines (or globally to a group),
so you would need to embed one of the objects data between the style definition of the other object.