SVG in Your Browser!
November 30th, 2005 by Jason
Here’s something interesting. Firefox 1.5 was just released yesterday. Among a plethora of other new and nifty features added to it is integrated support for SVG. For those of you who don’t know, SVG stands for Scaleable Vector Graphics. Okay… so why do you care? Well, I’m sure a quick Googlehunt will give you all kinds of answers… and most of them would be right. However, in the simplest terms possible, this can get graphics with smaller file sizes that are infinitely scaleable in your web browser. The closest example I can give (however inaccurate as it may be) is being able to run “something like Flash” in your browser… only you don’t need a plugin, and you don’t need anything Macromedia/Adobe to generate it, and it doesn’t have a lot of the disadvantages of Flash (like not being parsed by searchbots, for one). It’s not totally perfect, yet… but it’s coming really close.
“Great,” you say, “and now I bet you’re going to give us an example.” You’re exactly right! Here’s an SVG version of the crane in our Illustration Gallery. All vector graphics. Sweet!
Click here if you have a working version of Firefox 1.5 (otherwise, you’ll just see raw XML)
