Google's SVGWeb Making Vector Graphics Ubiquitous

As a few readers of this site may know, all too many years ago I wrote a book on Scalable Vector Graphics, or SVG, back around 2004. The book focused primarily on the Adobe SVG Viewer, at the time the only major implementation of SVG on the planet. While the tool was incredibly useful - it really served to highlight the potential that SVG could offer, and became the both the foundation for a number of applications over the years - Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia (and Flash) in 2006, coupled with Microsoft's continued intransigence in supporting anything other than their own Vector Markup Language (VML), provided the coup de grace that very nearly killed SVG outright.

However, SVG is not quite dead yet.

Over the last few years, there's been a dramatic attempt by all of the browser vendors with the exception of Microsoft to aim towards SVG 1.1 support. Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome all now support most of the SVG spec, with the near uniform exception of animation. For those that were a big fan of declarative animations in the ASV component, this has been frustrating, but overall the SVG Recommendation itself should be seen first and foremost as a graphics specification, not an animation one.

However, even given that, Internet Explorer has long been the major holdout. Since the ASV component was effectively abandoned by Adobe a couple of years ago, its meant that most of the SVG implementations that worked in IE were small, highly specialized efforts that typically were unable to get much market traction. Even though there's strong evidence that the IE browser is losing significant share, it is still the de facto browser on the planet (by numbers) and their reluctance to implement SVG has been a significant bar on adoption overall.

Recently, a new Google project is now beginning to force the issue. SVG Web is a project first debuted at the Google campus as part of SVG.org 2009. The premise behind the project is, like that of many Google projects, simultaneously simple and rather stunning in its implications.

In essence, they have used Flash as a platform to build an SVG implementation.This implementation is reasonably impressive - like Adobe's original ASV, it has full animation support, it has support for filters, it will eventually support glyphs. They then combined this with a JavaScript layer that lets the web developer choose either to use the native SVG renderer in the browser (usually just marginally faster than the Flash code to render) or to use the Flash renderer.

This extends to Internet Explorer. SVG Web's makes it possible to render SVG graphics in IE without requiring the specialized (and unsupported) ASV browser. This means that the same content can be rendered in the same way across multiple browsers, supporting both animation and DOM controller, not that important in HTML markup but vital in graphical overlays. What this does is complete the arc, finally, after more than eight years, making it possible to use SVG graphics without fear of those not being supported in the brower..

SVG Web supports two different modes of including SVG images within web pages. The first involves the use of the