€| What is SVG? You are probably right if you believe that XML can solve all the problems and graphics is no exception where you can apply XML. SVG or Scalable Vector Graphics is an implementation of XML, which defines two-dimensional graphics. It enables Web developers, designers, and users to move beyond the limitations of HTML and create robust visual content and interactivity through a simple declarative programming model. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) introduced SVG as an open standard in 1999 for publishing animation and for interactive applications using vector graphics on the Web. SVG 1.1 received W3C Recommendation in January 2003. The W3C specifications for Mobile and portable devices are SVG Tiny and SVG Basic 1.1.
€| SVG advantage: SVG files are smaller in size unlike other web graphics file formats like JPEG, PNG and GIF. It produces sharp and crisp images on screen or in print and on resource-limited hand-held devices. In addition, SVG supports scripting and animation, so is ideal for interactive, data-driven, personalized graphics. It provides for greater colour control, and offers gradient and masking. Since SVG is XML-based, it offers unparalleled dynamic interactivity. SVG images can respond to user actions with highlighting, tool tips, special effects, audio, and animation. It can be magnified up to 16 times without sacrificing sharpness, detail, or clarity. SVG is a royalty-free vendor-neutral open standard developed under the W3C. It is text-based, not binary and like HTML, SVG files can be viewed or edited using a text editor. Even a beginner can look at the ‘human readable’ SVG source code and immediately make sense of the descriptive content relative to the graphic presentation. SVG files have the extension “.svg” and gzip-compressed versions have .svgz on all platforms. It is specifically decided in the SVG Working Group to use gzip compression as it drastically reduces SVG file size.
€| Including SVG in Web pages: There are a variety of ways in which SVG content can be included within a Web page. In a stand-alone SVG Web page, an SVG document is loaded directly into a Web browser. SVG can be embedded using the most common ‘img’ element, the ‘object’ element or the ‘applet’ element in HTML/ XHTML. It can also be embedded inline directly within the parent Web page with an SVG document fragment textually included within the XHTML.
€| SVG Viewer and Authoring Tools: There are a large number of different SVG viewer implementations. The most popular is the Adobe SVG Viewer (www.adobe.com/svg/) plug-in available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Macintosh OS. It runs in Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and many other browsers.
€| Inkscape: Inkscape (www.inkscape.org/) is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.
€| Apache Batik SVG Toolkit: Another complete implementation is the Apache Batik (xml.apache.org/batik/) project, which is open source. It is a Java-based software library for viewing, generation and manipulation of SVG images.
€| TinyLine: TinyLine provides Mobile SVG Applications and Development Tools for Java devices. It is a Personal Java (J2ME) software development kit for applications that want to use images in the Mobile Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format for various purposes on Java enabled devices.
€| SVG Support in OpenOffice: Graphics created using OpenOffice Drawing can be exported as SVG image and the images can be viewed in any SVG viewer. One can use any XML editor of choice for editing SVG, ensuring the image is well formed XML.
€| SVG in Mobile Phones: The importance of SVG is much more prominent in Mobile Phones where it fits in quite appropriately and therefore, many Mobile manufacturers are actively supporting the SVG technology. SVG Tiny 1.1 Plus is the current technology included in mobile phones and allows for full-fledged SMIL-based animation, all core graphics and text features, and graphics refinements such as fill and stroke opacity as well as gradients. SVG Tiny 1.2 will take mobile SVG one-step further by providing scripting capabilities as well as multimedia embedding support.
€| SVG for GIS: SVG, being a rich visual medium with the capacity for well-structured metadata, is often used to provide Geographical Information System functionality on the Web.
€| SVG is ready to take the Web: The main competitor to SVG is Flash. The two have a lot of similar features. The biggest advantage that SVG has over Flash is the compliance with other standards (e.g. XSL and the DOM). SVG is a new, open XML format, generally acknowledged to be technically superior, but has not yet reached the same level of popularity like SWF. However, with the enthusiasm shown by the people developing SVG content and strong support from industry and Open Source developers, it shouldn’t be long before SVG becomes a dominant Web format.