Advantages of SVG

If you were around in the early days of the Web, you might remember the excitement as newcomers to HTML were able to learn the new technology rapidly because the HTML source code was always accessible in a Web browser. SVG offers the same advantage: A student of SVG can study the source code of an interesting or impressive graphic and need not deal with a steep learning curve.

The Adobe SVG Viewer can be downloaded from www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html and is a plug-in for conventional Web browsers. The SVG source code of an image displayed in the Adobe SVG Viewer is accessed by simply right-clicking the SVG image and selecting the View Source option.

The Batik standalone SVG viewer is available for download from http://xml.apache.org/batik/. Batik can also be used in Java applications to dynamically create and display SVG.

SVG can be combined with other XML application languages. New-generation browsers such as the X-Smiles browser (www.x-smiles.org) enable multiple XML languages to be combined into XML-based Web pages. For example, you could use SVG images within an XHTML Web page that also contains forms using the XML-based XForms specification. An alternative approach is to create all-SVG Web pages, such as those you can see at www.XMML.com/.