Scalable Vector Graphics
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a computer language to describe two dimensional images. It's based on XML and created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The language allows to describe pictures by their elements. So you can zoom in and it is stays clear without big pixels.
The W3C published SVG in September 2001. The most browsers can show this graphics but the Internet Explorer cannot. He needs a plugin to show them.
The normal Filename extension is .svg and the MIME-Typen is image/svg+xml
.
[edit] Strukture
SVG uses Extensible Markup Language (XML). So it has an definition of the document type.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:ev="http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events"
version="1.1" baseProfile="full"
width="800mm" height="600mm">
<!-- content of the file -->
</svg>
[edit] difference between bitmap and vector images
This image illustrates the difference between bitmap and vector images. The vector image can be scaled indefinitely, while the bitmap cannot.