What's New
| 2000-Apr-13 | An article on SVG and Trajectory Pro, 新しいベクター画像形式SVGに対応したドローソフト「Trajectory Pro」 (in Japanese) |
| 2000-Apr-12 | The SVG in Mozilla Project now has its own project page, where status updates can be found. The nifty logo is. of course, also available in SVG. |
| 2000-Apr-12 | A new version 0.9 CSIRO SVG Toolkit is released. The announcement summarises the changes from previous versions; there is also fuller docuentation of the supported features. Hilights include SVG DOM support, a CSS parser, DOM level 2, and the ability to be used as a converter from SVG to various raster image formats. |
| 2000-Apr-05 | A four-part article on SVG: Grafiken mit XML by Holger Reibold, in Internet Professionell Net Tech Iin German) |
| 2000-Apr-05 | Preview Release 0.2 of Trajectory Pro, the SVG authoring tool from JASC, is now available. There is a list of new features, enhancements and fixes, and discussion continues on the Trajectory Pro newsgroup. |
| 2000-Apr-03 | Version 5.1.0 of the Grace plotting tool for scientific data now has SVG export support. |
| 2000-Mar-07 | Digapp release a technology preview of an SVG2PDF converter. It runs on MacOS, Windows 95/98/2000 and NT 4. |
| 2000-Mar-03 | The eighth working draft of SVG was released to the public. It enters a second last call period. Here is the list of changes from previous versions. Jackaroo, a new implementation of Stylable SVG, is announced by the Koala team. Its written in Java, and uses DOM Juan, a small-footprint DOM Level 2 implementation, to get access to the XML and CSS for rendering. |
| 2000-Mar-01 | JASC announced the first prototype version of Trajectory Pro, an authoring tool for SVG that is expected to support animation and interactivity in later releases. It runs on Windows 9x/NT4/2000. The internal format of Trajectory Pro appears to be SVG, and the XML source can be viewed at any time during editing. There is a newsgroup for feedback and discussion. |
| 2000-Feb-29 | A half-page article "SVG: le vectoriel en ligne" in the first (Mars/Avril) issue of French magazine Create (tout reste à inventer), plus coverage of SVG in LiveMotion. On Designer.com, Part II of The Future Of Web Design, by Anthony Celeste covers MNG and SVG. |
| 2000-Feb-25 | Version 3.17 of ps2edit translates PostScript and PDF to, among other things, SVG. The free version outputs to a wide variety of formats, and comes with source; the shareware version adds plugins (no-source) to also export MIF, CGM, SVG, EMF and RTF. Ghostscript is required, as a PostScript interpreter. The SVG-exporting version runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000, Solaris, or Linux. |
| 2000-Feb-20 | A new raster-to-vector program, AutoTrace, exports to several formats including SVG. In addition to tracing using lines, it can also trace using NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) curves. Full source is available (GPL), and it runs on a vraiety of 'nices (Linux, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX), Windows, and OS/2. A demonstration of Chemistry applications of SVG by David Rzepa of Imperial College, London. includes both reaction diagrams and 2D views of 3D conformation |
| 2000-Feb-17 | An SVG output filter for DrawTool, described by Toby Jaffey as "a series of toy programs (most notably a logo interpreter) which ... can now output both PostScript and SVG" is available from Project Purple. Source (GPL) available, in Perl; uses GTK. |
| 2000-Feb-16 | An issue of Style matters by Didier Martin, entitled Component-Based Page Layouts, covers translating XML and XLink to HTML using XSL-T, including transforming XLinks (pointing to SVG files) into inline SVG images. |
| 2000-Feb-15 | Adobe announces the public availability of their SVG Export plug-in for Adobe Illustrator 8.01 (Mac and Win), SVG display plug-in for Netscape 4.x (Mac and Win), and SVG display ActiveX control for MS IE5 and MS Word (Win). These had been widely demonstrated to the public, but had previously required registration and signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The preview site includes examples and a detailed tutorial. Also available in Japanese. |
| 2000-Feb-13 | Scripting News reports on some experiences using the Mayura Draw for SVG export, and the Adobe SVG plug-in. Carmen Delessio announced a WMF to SVG servlet which allows WMF from Visio and MS Word, among others, to be converted. |
| 2000-Feb-8 | An article on SVG in general, and Adobe LiveMotion in particular at france.internet.com (in French). |
| 2000-Jan-26 | A fourth beta SVG export filter for CorelDraw 9 is now available for download. |
| 2000-Jan-17 | Jon Udell of BYTE Magazine discusses SVG as one way of dynamically generating a graph of constantly-updated data. Anyone care to produce an SVG alternative to the table-based, HTML graph in that article? |
| 2000-Jan-15 | Sketch, the SVG-enabled drawing program for Linux and other 'nices now has a new Web page, and is bundled with Mandrake Linux. |
| 2000-Jan-13 | An article on SVG in issue 59 of PC Extra magazine (in Swedish) including a sample graphic of a boat. |
| 1999-Dec-15 | A new version, 0.3c of the IBM SVGViewer was released today on Alphaworks. Improvements include conformance to the 3 December SVG Working Draft; performance tuning, particularly for paths; bug fixes, and better 'symbol' and 'use' support - plus more example files. |
| 1999-Dec-15 | The third beta of a Corel Draw SVG export plug-in was released. |
| 1999-Dec-15 | A raster to vector converter with SVG output was released by a research group including Koichi Mori, a graduate student at University of Tsukuba, Japan. It reads 8bit-per-pixel Windows BMP files, and runs on Windows 95/98/NT. It generates not only lines, but also curves, to match the raster shapes. |
| 1999-Dec-3 | The seventh working draft of SVG was released to the public. Here is the list of changes from previous versions. |
| 1999-Dec-1 | A new version 0.6.3 of Sketch, the Python drawing program for Linux and other Unices which both imports and exports SVG. |
| 1999-Nov-29 | Version 0.3b of the IBM SVG Viewer is released. In addition to bug fixes, there is support for 'symbol' and 'use', gradient-filling on text, plus a progressive rendering feature |
| 1999-Nov-29 | XYZ Sistemas Industriales, S.A. announced the SVG Internet Mapper. Its an exciting application of on-the-fly generated SVG, with dynamic capabilities such as linking to additional information. (It also uses HTML, and so requires an SVG plug-in; and it uses the 'embed' tag so won't work with viewers that use the 'applet' tag.) They are asking for feedback to help improve this mapper. |
| 1999-Nov-26 | A new version 0.8 CSIRO SVG Viewer is released. There is a list of changes from previous versions An article in PRIMonline: SVG - a grafika istene by Zsadányi Pál (in Hungarian) |
| 1999-Nov-19 | A new article on WebDeveloper.com, entitled Get Ready for the Awesome Power of SVG, by Kas Thomas. |
| 1999-Nov-15 | ILOG announced SVG support in their JViews Component Suite. System integrators can now produce SVG-enabled thin clients, and display mapping data, graphs, or Gantt charts using JViews. |
| 1999-Nov-11 | Article on Scalable Vector Graphics - Web Graphics with Original Quality Artwork by Tad Lane, includes examples |
| 1999-Nov-10 | An article on SVG in MacSimple, by Kas Thomas. And don't miss part two. An article on good Web design with CSS and SVG (in Danish, also available in English) by Bent Rasmussen |
| 1999-Oct-29 | Corel announce the second public beta of an SVG export filter for Corel Draw 9. |
| 1999-Oct-26 | Infoworld has a story by Michael Lattig about the IBM AFP to SVG transcoder. |
| 1999-Oct-23 | SVGView 0.3a now supports the Aug 12th W3C SVG Working Draft. It provides several important enhancements, including improved network support. |
| 1999-Oct-22 | A demo of IBM AFP to SVG transcoder is available from alphaworks. Advanced Function Print (AFP) is an IBM print format, and this transcoder allows AFP documents to be viewed on the web by acting as a proxy which converts them to SVG. |
| 1999-Oct-20 | The Builder.com SVG article is now available in Czech. |
| 1999-Oct-19 | A new beta of Mayura Draw, with improved SVG export, was released. |
| 1999-Oct-14 | An article by Michael Durwin of Shore.Net on SVG |
| 1999-Oct-13 | An article on XML Namespaces by Pankaj Kamthan includes examples which mix XHTML , MathML, and SVG. |
| 1999-Oct-08 | An interview with Chris Lilley about SVG on Builder.Com discusses the features, benefits, implementation status and likely impact of SVG. |
| 1999-Sep-22 | Sketch, an illustration program for Unix-like systems ( Linux, Solaris, BSD, AIX, IRIX) by Bernhard Herzog has SVG import and export support in version 0.62. Sketch is written in Python. |
| 1999-Sep-20 | Takahashi Masahiro (高橋 雅博) released a new version of his SVG Viewer (Japanese documentation). Its 100% pure Java, uses Java 1.2, and supports both JPEG and PNG inline images (using com.sun.image.codec.jpeg of JDK 1.2 for JPEG, and JAI1.0 for PNG). Basic shapes, paths and text are implemented. |
| 1999-Sep-18 | Concordia University Computational Mathematics Laboratory has a site devoted to SVG |
| 1999-Sep-17 | Mayura Draw 3.6beta now has
SVG export support. Mayura Draw comes with some SVG samples exported from it:
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| 1999-Sep-16 | FOP, an XSL Formatting Objects to PDF converrter, now has a "tiny bit of SVG support" according to it's author, James Tauber. It generates XSL FO output, with embedded SVG, and renders this all to PDF taking advantage of the pluggable element handlers for rendering the SVG portion. See example PDF slides made from XML source (including SVG) using XSL-T and FOP. |
| 1999-Sep-14 | A talk by Chris
Lilley on SVG at XML World in Ottawa is now online.
David Sims reports on this talks.
Slides require a CSS 1 enabled HTML browser for decent display, and the slides are optimised for 1024x768. |
| 1999-Sep-14 | A new version 0.71 CSIRO SVG Viewer is released. |
| 1999-Sep-07 | Mayura Draw will have SVG export support |
| 1999-Sep-06 | An article 'Doing It With SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Part 1by Ken Sall, has a good introduction to SVG and includes reviews of IBM SVGView and CSIRO SVG viewer, hints on minimising SVG graphic size, and pointers to further information. We await Part 2! |
| 1999-Sep-02 | Sodipodi 0.11, described by it's author Lauris Kaplinski as "a toy" nevertheless can import and export SVG. It runs on Linux, uses Gnome, and comes with GPL'ed source. |
| 1999-Aug-30 | Corel announce the public beta of an SVG export filter for Corel Draw 9, at the Seybold SF publishing conference. They also anticipate having SVG import capability later on. |
| 1999-Aug-30 | SVG article on designer.com |
| 1999-Aug-24 | Version 0.2a of IBM SVGView is posted on alphaworks. |
| 1999-Aug-17 | Version 0.5 of the CSIRO SVG viewer is released. |
| 1999-Aug-13 | An article on SVG at webreview.com. |
| 1999-Aug-12 | The sixth Working Draft of SVG goes to last call. Here is the list of changes from the fifth draft. Detailed review comments, both from users and implementors, are encouraged and should be sent to svg-comments@w3.org. Detailed discussion should continue to take place on the www-svg@w3.org mailing list. |
| 1999-Aug-11 | The Web 3D Consortium issued a press release to announce that they have joined W3C, that X3D will be part of the next generation ISO VRML 2002 standard and that they are working on X3D interoperability with XHTML, XML, SVG, DOM and SMIL. |
| 1999-Jul-30 | The IBM SVGView SVG viewer, written in Java 2, is posted on alphaworks. It uses the IBM XML4J parser. |
| 1999-Jul-30 | The fifth Working Draft of SVG was released. Here is the list of changes from the fourth draft. |
| 1999-Jul-29 | An article SVG - What's in it for us? by Janus Boye is published on irt.org |
| 1999-Jul-21 | Dean Jackson of CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences announced an SVG Viewer in Java, with source. It uses the Sun XML parser. |
| 1999-Jul-20 | Gill adds inline image support, including full PNG transparency |
| 1999-Jul-06 | The fourth Working Draft of SVG was released. See the list of changes from the third draft. |
| 1999-Jun-25 | The third working draft of SVG was released. See the list of changes from the second draft. |
| 1999-Jun-23 | Raph Levien posted an essay on fonts in SVG which points out the importance of consistent rendering across implementations and the need for a single, dependable font format for SVG to use. |
| 1999-Jun-21 | A first version of Gill, the Gnome Illustration application is announced. The author of Gill, Raph Levien, says that it 'will eventually support all of SVG'. Gnome will work on any Unix platform. |
| 1999-Jun-21 | IBM demonstrate a prototype SVG Viewer, in Java 2, at Java One. |
| 1999-Jun-05 | An article on SVG in Mozillazine announces that Jeremy Lea has started an SVG project for Mozilla. |
| 1999-May-14 | Chris Lilley of W3C, Jon Ferraiolo of Adobe and Vincent Hardy of Sun gave SVG talks on developers day at the Eighth International Web Conference. Ken Sall wrote up a review for Web Developers Virtual Library which concluded SVG is a near term reality. |
| 1999-May-10 | A Java SVG renderer, with source, is first announced on the www-svg mailing list by Carmen Delessio of BlackDirt Software. It uses the IBM XML4J parser. A Windows Metafile to SVG converter, again in Java with source, is also announced. |
| 1999-Apr-28 | A technology preview implementation of an SVG renderer, by Adobe, is demonstrated to the public at the XML Europe 99 conference in Granada, Spain. (no, it isn't publically available yet) |
| 1999-Apr-12 | A new SVG Working Draft was released. Here are the changes from the previous public draft. |
| 1999-Mar-04 | Webmonkey has a Sneak Peek at SVG written by Steve Mulder |
| 1999-Feb-15 | SVG news coverage:
An SVG page is added to the Yahoo! Graphics Formats entry |
| 1999-Feb-12 | SVG news coverage:
|
| 1999-Feb-11 |
First public draft of SVG was released |
What is it
SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML. SVG allows for three types of graphic objects: vector graphic shapes (e.g., paths consisting of straight lines and curves), images and text. Graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and composited into previously rendered objects. Text can be in any XML namespace suitable to the appplication, which enhances searchability and accessibility of the SVG graphics. The feature set includes nested transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects, template objects and extensibility.
SVG drawings can be dynamic and interactive. The Document Object Model (DOM) for SVG, which includes the full XML DOM, allows for straightforward and efficient vector graphics animation via scripting. 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.
Status
SVG is currently in it's eighth Working Draft, and has entered a second last call phase.
The first draft was released on 11st February, 1999 (press release and Testimonials from SVG Working Group members. ).
This means it is a snapshot of work in progress; it can and will change, but has been released for public comment and feedback (which should be directed to www-svg@w3.org).
There are an increasing number of implementations appearing.
More information
MIME type
The MIME type for SVG will be image/svg-xml to bring it in line with a general scheme for XML MIME types. It has not yet been registered with IANA, as SVG is not yet a W3C Recommendation.
XML templates
There are two DTDs for SVG. To make a valid SVG graphic, start with this skeleton:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 20000303 Stylable//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/03/WD-SVG-20000303/DTD/svg-20000303-stylable.dtd"> <svg width="4in" height="3in"> <desc><!-- put a description here --> </desc> <g><!-- your graphic here --> </g> </svg>
To make a well-formed SVG graphic, or a document which includes multiple namespaces including SVG, start with this skeleton:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?> <svg width="4in" height="3in" xmlns = 'http://www.w3.org/2000/svg-20000303-stylable'> <desc><!-- put a description here --> </desc> <g><!-- your graphic here --> </g> </svg>
Remember to add an encoding declaration if your file is not in UTF-8 or UTF-16. Yes, even if (especially if) it is in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)!
