future of svg, revisited

April 15th, 2008 by

A lot has changed for the better since my post four years ago on preventing the death of SVG.

Today, we have excellent SVG (and canvas) implementations in Safari, Firefox, and Opera. dojox.gfx provides a simple JavaScript API based on SVG nomenclature for abstracting away inconsistencies between implementations, and also allow VML and Silverlight support for IE browsers.

Lately, Apple has been taking an interesting approach of leveraging key SVG stylistics features and exposing them through CSS: CSS gradients, CSS transforms, and CSS animations. What’s really interesting is that some of the best features of SVG are making their way into HTML+CSS.

I’m starting to wonder if the future of SVG for the most common 80% is just HTML, CSS, a few new shape and path elements, and some additions to the HTML coordinate system.

3 Comments »

3 Responses to “future of svg, revisited”

  1. on 15 Apr 2008 at 8:341 Scott Schiller

    Sounds somewhat reasonable to me. I haven’t messed with SVG, but I imagine some of the CSS transforms might introduce some interesting layout behaviour questions. (e.g., a box at 45 degrees, floated left – does text wrap around the binding box, or “tight” to the angled lines?)

  2. on 24 Apr 2008 at 22:392 Dylan

    More great additions:

    CSS Masks

    CSS Canvas Drawing

    Will we see CSS Variables next?

  3. on 24 Jun 2008 at 22:103 Dylan Schiemann » Blog Archive » css variables in webkit

    […] recent post from David Hyatt on the www-style-list answers my question from April 15th: Will we see CSS variables next?. The short answer is […]

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