SVG 1.1 and Mobile SVG graduate to "Proposed Recommendations"

The W3C has announced that SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) 1.1 and Mobile SVG have become Proposed Recommendations.

SVG can be thought of as Flash, but re-imagined as an open standard based on XML and JavaScript. SVG 1.1 is basically a cleanup of 1.0, and “modularizes” the standard into reusable building blocks — not terribly exciting except for the repackaging that it enables. Mobile SVG is an example of that repackaging, and consists of two SVG profiles (SVG Tiny and SVG Basic) optimized for cellphones and PDAs.

In related news, the SVG Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of SVG 1.2. That release will address issues such as integration with other XML “stuff” (like SMIL and XForms), DOM (Document Object Model) enhancements, text wrapping, printing, streaming (allowing devices to render SVG without keeping an in-memory DOM for the data, for example), and painting and rendering enhancements.

SVG hasn’t made a dent as a media format so far, but that will change. When it does, Adobe (who’s embraced SVG like Apple has MPEG-4) will be the clear SVG authoring leader. This will leave Macromedia playing catch-up with Flash authoring tools rejiggered to output SVG. Although Macromedia continues to advance Flash with things like video, it’s ultimately lipstick on a pig, and hopefully they’ll start thinking about supporting standards other than HTML before Flash is remembered as fondly as Cinepak. | SVG 1.1 | Mobile SVG | SVG 1.2 Working Draft


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