Chapter 7. AJAX Real-Time Charting with SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is one of the emerging technologies with a good chance of becoming the next “big thing” for web graphics, as was the case with Flash. SVG is a language for defining two-dimensional graphics. SVG isn’t necessarily related to web development, but it fits very well into the picture because it complements the features offered naturally by web browsers. Today, there are more SVG implementations and standardization isn’t great, but things are expected to improve in the future.

SVG is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation since January 2003. Among the big names that have contributed to its creation we can mention Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Apple, IBM, and Kodak to name just a few. The current specification is SVG 1.2. SVG Mobile, SVG Print, and sXBL are other recommendations under work at W3C that are likely to get support on most browsers and platforms.

The main features of SVG are:

• SVG graphics are defined in XML...