SVG
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a language for describing two-dimensional static and animated vector graphics in XML.
SVG became a W3C recommendation in September 2001. SVG was developed in a long process after Macromedia and Microsoft introduced VML whereas Adobe and Sun Microsystems submitted a competing format known as PGML. SVG is natively supported in the Amaya web browser.
In other ones, a plugin, like or , is needed to see SVG images, but
they can be displayed by external editors and viewers. A special version of
Mozilla, called "Croczilla", now supports parts of the W3C SVG Standard, but much is still unsupported; the eventual goal is that SVG can be displayed without any need for plug-ins. The KDE project's Konqueror web browser also has a fairly complete SVG implementation called , and that support will likely filter down to Apple Computer's Safari web browser in the future. Java programs can make use of the to render, generate, and manipulate SVG graphics.
From the W3C :
- SVG allows three types of graphic objects:
- vector graphic shapes (e.g. paths consisting of straight lines and curves, and areas bounded by them)
- raster graphics images / digital images
- text
- Graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and composited into previously rendered objects. Text can be in any XML namespace suitable to the application, which enhances searchability and accessibility of the SVG graphics. The feature set includes nested transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects, template objects and Document Object Model (DOM) for SVG, which includes the full XML DOM, allows straightforward and efficient vector graphics animation via ECMAScript or SMIL. A rich set of event handlers such as onmouseover and onclick can be assigned to any SVG graphical object. Because of its compatibility and leveraging of other Web standards, features like scripting can be done on SVG elements and other XML elements from different namespaces simultaneously within the same web page.
SVG rivals Macromedia Flash in terms of potential and power, and is an open standard, unlike Flash; on the other hand, the Flash plugin is much more wide-spread than its SVG counterparts. It is not yet possible to Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw support SVG export. OpenOffice.org Draw 1.1 and up can also export SVG files. Sodipodi and Inkscape are two other (open source, multi-platform) tools that use the SVG format.
See also
