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Firefox 1.1 Plans Native SVG Support
Spy Hunter writes "The Scalable Vector Graphics format has yet to take off on the web, perhaps due to a small installed base of SVG-enabled browsers. That could soon change as the latest Firefox 1.1 nightly builds have started coming with native SVG support compiled in and enabled by default. If this feature makes into the Firefox 1.1 release (which is not certain, but likely, as the developers want it to happen) it will increase the number of web users who have an SVG renderer installed. But perhaps more interesting than that is the possibility of mixing SVG graphic elements directly into the markup of regular XHTML pages, freeing vector graphics from the small rectangle of a browser plugin and opening up a host of exciting new possibilities for web developers. This is enabled by the integration of SVG directly into the Gecko rendering engine, instead of as a browser plugin. With such a useful web developer feature available only in Firefox, could we soon start seeing websites asking their users to download Firefox to get the best browsing experience?"
Take a look at http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/About.html for more information on SVG.
They're not really in a position to be better than a JPG, in the cases where a JPG would be used to display an images with thousdands or millions of colours.
On the other hand, SVG offers an easier (or what seems should be easier) method of dynamically-generating images like charts and graphs. Combined with some javascript (think XMLHttpRequest), you can change and interact with these graphs in realtime. Along with vector graphic's "infinite" resolution you've got a lot of powerful options for graphing alone.
Who doesn't like free music?
---Why its better than JPEG?
Well, they're both good for different things.
JPEGS are simple raster images. A jpeg and a bitmap are one in the same (with jpeg having good compression). Simply, it comes down to this bit is this color, this bit is this color, and this bit is this color. If you magnify raster images, you end up with blurred and horribly pixellated images that have almost no resemblance of the original.
A SVG (and similar technologies) uses vector graphics. The best way to explain this is thus: Graph a line Y=X on a xy coordinate plane. You end up with a 45 degreee angle. Now, if you were to view a portion between 0 and 10^-100(X) and 0 to 10^-100(y) it's still going to be a line. It's not going to be a stairstep pixelated crap.
Probably the best usage of SVG's would be simple images made for dramatically inbcreasing size (like icons in KDE) or other size-variation.
The only way to do pretty increasing size icons now are to shim a javascript to display 6 or so jpegs that were manually sized. These do not account for resolution on your screen.
Hopefully, Ive made clear what these things are.
http://www.inkscape.org/
Spine World
SVGT [SVG-Tiny] does not support scripting. SVGB [SVG-Basic] allows optional support of scripting, and includes all of the language features from SVG 1.1 to support scripting.
Both SVGB and SVGT support the full set of SVG 1.1's declarative animation features:
The language features to support animation through scripting and DOM are available in SVGB. SVGT only supports declarative animation.
SVGB and SVGT allow implicit targeting of parent elements, and targeting elements using the 'xlink:href' attribute.
SVGB and SVGT support linear, spline, paced and discrete animations.
CTRL+plus, CTRL+minus (increase font size, decrease font size) corrects the glitch without reloading and, unlike reloading, every time.