The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which Apple is a member, has issued Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 and Mobile SVG Profiles as W3C Candidate Recommendations. Advancement of these documents to Candidate Recommendation is a statement that the specifications are stable. It is also an invitation to the Web development community at large to make further implementations of SVG and provide technical feedback.
“As with all W3C Recommendations, SVG builds on established, open W3C technologies such as XML, CSS and DOM. SVG also has received rigorous review for Internationalization and Web Accessibility requirements, which results in natural integration with existing technologies,” said Chris Lilley, chair of the SVG Working Group and member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). “This maximizes application power while minimizing its footprint. Adopting open, truly standards-based solutions is already showing return on investment; the pieces fit together in powerful, extensible and economical ways.”
Candidate Recommendation is W3C’s public call for implementation, an explicit invitation for W3C Members and the developer community at large to review the Mobile SVG specification, build their own implementations of Mobile SVG and create Mobile SVG content for testing. W3C also invites the developer community to create multi-namespace SVG documents and to create document types that include SVG as the graphical component.
SVG 1.1 separates SVG capabilities into reusable building blocks, and SVG Mobile re-combines them in a way optimized for mobile devices. W3C has used the SVG 1.1 building blocks to make two profiles or subsets of full SVG: SVG Tiny, aimed at multimedia capable cellphones such as the recently announced 3G units, and SVG Basic for handheld and palmtop computers.