The Next Internet: The Power of SVG Graphics

sido
2005-04-13T13:41:45Z

HTML has been so successful largely because it is extremely simple. You could say that without HTML, the internet would not be as powerful as it is today. A new language, called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), promises to mirror the ease and utility of HTML and provide an entirely new internet experience.

SVG is an XML-based graphics file format and web language. (Adobe provides a good explanation.)

SVG offers higher graphic quality, is zoomable and far more interactive than XML, being based on live data. Not only that, it's easy to create SVG-based web pages or web elements. (That's the money shot.)

Search engine spiders will be crawling around SVG-based media. This is something that's currently difficult to do. Imagine Google being able to search graphics not based on what the file name of the graphic is but what makes up the graphic or media. (This echoes the pre-Google days of internet searching.)

Basically, SVG enables web graphics to change at the user's whim. SVG-based graphics would give consumers more choices because the consumer would control and could better-visualize the transaction they are making. Imagine going to Amazon or My Yahoo and, instead of just seeing personalized text you also saw personalized graphics. These are just some of the possibilities.

SVG will do for graphics what XML is currently doing for text, and much more.

SVG functionality will also be a part of the next version of Firefox (1.1, expected in June) and Opera.