SVG Tiny 1.2 about to be adopted

The World Wide Web Consortium has released the Proposed Recommendation for version 1.2 of the SVG Tiny (SVGT) specification. A Proposed Recommendation is the final stage before a W3C standard is officially adopted. SVGT 1.2 is a subset of the forthcoming SVG 1.2 specification and supersedes and replaces the SVG 1.1 Tiny and Basic profiles – for mobile phones and PDAs respectively – that was created in 2003.

Over time, it became apparent that SVGT 1.1 was essentially too restrictive. Cellphones compatible with SVGT 1.1 didn't support Document Object Model (DOM), didn't allow style definitions via CSS, and didn't run Javascript, meaning no interactivity aside from simple animations.

The new version is different. Rather than separate Tiny and Basic specifications, SVGT 1.2 applies to both mobile phones and PDAs.

Unlike the previous version, 1.2 has no document type definition (DTD), but uses a mandatory RelaxNG scheme instead. While referencing a DTD via DOCTYPE is impractical, the mechanism for internal entities can be used: <!DOCTYPE svg [ <!ENTITY EName "..."> ]>.

SVG is not widely supported yet, but when it finally is, it will banish many of the jagged bitmap images from the web and from HTML-rendered content. SVG allows icons and images to be supplied in a format that can be scaled smoothly to any size, which is just as important when shrinking images to fit the small screens of mobile devices as it is when enlarging them to be clear on future very high-resolution flat-panel displays. Today, in approximate order of completeness, Opera does best but is still not entirely there, then Apple's Safari, then other Webkit-based browsers, then Mozilla browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still requires a plug-in to display SVG at all.

(trk)