What About SVG?

What about it? And more importantly, what is it?

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. It's an open standard developed by W3C to compete with Adobe's vector format, not to mention the vector capabilities of Flash & Silverlight, though Silverlight is in itself a competitor (Flash being the old and formerly innovative browser expansion). Back in the day, Flash was the only way to include all forms of media in a common media form. Audio, video, animation, games, whatever - everything could be embedded through flash, and at the same time, too.

While vector graphics are not the primary trait of Flash, it's an interesting capability and it earlier it has only been available on web-pages through Flash. To scale images without losing quality is a feature with a lot of potential; the only truly lossless image manipulation method on the web. Yet SVG is a new player on the market. Chrome is the only browser that fully supported SVG since the start. Firefox came soon after (or earlier actually, since it's much older than Chrome and has supoorted SVG since the second release), and now all major browsers support it, even the mobile ones.

Still SVG is not a widely used format at all. Why not? It promises a smaller filesize on formats such as GIF and PNG. It works directly through the page, and doesn't require an http request such as images do. It's an open standard, too, not locked like both Flash & Silverlight are. If you look around for demos you'll see that there's a lot of potential, and not only for vector-based images but also for animation and 3D effects. Look around! There are plenty of tools to work with creating SVGs; hopefully I'll have time to learn how to use them soon! It's time everybody learns what SVG is... or forgets in quickly in favor of even better technology.