SVG diagram showing text along a path around a duck

SVG diagram showing animation of a duck path

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

F.R.A. Hopgood (Oxford Brookes University), I. Herman (CWI and W3C) and D.A. Duce (Oxford Brookes University)

The vast majority of graphics on the web today is raster graphics which suffers from a number of limitations. Linking to portions of a raster image is not easy, the content of a raster image cannot be searched, the appearance of a raster image cannot be controlled by the web's styling mechanisms, it is not possible to zoom the content of a raster image. Raster graphics is not the only way of doing graphics on the Web. Vector graphics is also a possibility, and recent work within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop a standard for 2D vector graphics, called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is attracting considerable commercial interest and is set to change the way that 2D graphics are done on the web. SVG and SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) have a common set of animation facilities that have been extended in SVG to provide a rich client-side animation environment. The DOM interface enables rich interactive presentations to be constructed using scripting languages.

Totorial attendees will receive a thorough introduction to SVG and will be able to construct reasonably complex diagrams by the end of the tutorial. They will also gain an appreciation of where SVG stands in relationship to other W3C standards.

Content

  • Introduction, coordinates and rendering
  • Drawing elements
  • Grouping and Transformations
  • Attributes and properties
  • Animation
  • Linking and interaction
  • Tools and the Future

    • Presenters

    Bob Hopgood was the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's W3C Advisory Committee representative where he was active in getting a Web profile for the Computer Graphics Metafile agreed and helped establis W3C's Offices in Europe. He was also Programme Chair for WWW5 in Paris. On his retirement, he worked for the World Wide Web Consortium for a year as Head of Offices. He is now a visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University. He has over 35 years experience in computer graphics, especially in standardisation activities and has lectured internationally on emerging web standards. He has given a number of seminars and tutorials on SVG to international audiences during 2000 and 2001.

    Ivan Herman is a senior researcher at CWI and is now Head of Offices for the World Wide Web Consortium. He has been involved in the development and implementation of graphics standards for nearly 20 years. He is using SVG extensively in one of his areas of research, graph visualization.

    David Duce is Professor in Computing at Oxford Brookes University. He has been involved in the development of standards for computer graphics for 20 years, starting with the Graphical Kernel System (GKS). Together with Bob Hopgood, he submitted a proposal to W3C entitled Web Schematics, which launched the SVG activity (though the result bears almost no resemblance to web schematics!). He has participated in the development of SVG and represents Oxford Brookes University on the Advisory Committee of W3C.