Something Very Good is happening. It's called scalable vector graphics, or SVG.
We've been teased with vector graphics for some time now. Jeffrey Veen introduced us to
the power of vector graphics
almost a year ago and pleaded for a standard. Web authors everywhere began to salivate over what it promised:
Two-dimensional graphics that could be created by the browser based on plain text instructions contained in the code. Instead of having a
GIF image that accounted for every pixel of a circle, a Web author could embed simple instructions in the page, such as "draw a
circle here and make it look like so-and-so." The browser would follow the instructions and draw the circle to the screen.
No image file was necessary, just a wee bit of code.
A working draft of SVG was recently released by the World Wide Web Consortium.
It was partly inspired by two specifications submitted earlier to the W3C for review: VML (by Microsoft, Macromedia,
and others) and PGML (by Adobe, Netscape, Sun, and others). And now SVG is well on the way to becoming the vector graphics
language of choice for the Web.
We'll take an early look at this draft of SVG, examining what it offers Web authors and audiences. SVG is
still very much a rough draft of what is to come, but it is certainly enough to keep Web folks drooling.
The first thing you should know is that SVG is plain text. The code can live right within an HTML document with no other
files involved. (This is how it's different from Flash, which is a binary format that takes more than a
plain text editor to create.)
The second thing to be aware of is that SVG is written in XML. There are good reasons for this. XML is a
powerful, simple way to present structured information on the Web.
(For a refresher on XML, Jay can help.)
But what you're surely itching to know is what you'll be able to do with SVG. Well, you'll be able to draw with the aplomb of a giddy Etch-a-Sketcher.
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