[whatwg] How to use SVG in HTML5?

[David Gerard]

On 24/01/2008, Krzysztof Żelechowski <giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl> wrote:

> I hereby grant you the right to use in-line SVG
> provided the only element used inside is solid filled path.
> (No gradients, transformations, mitres, text and such).
> I remember using VML in this spirit myself.
> Thanks for the redirection, the pictures are very nice!


This is a good example of why people will want to use SVGs just like
any other sort of image:
* vector drawing is the right way to do lots of sorts of image
* SVG is a standard and increasingly widely-used vector format
* Inkscape's a reasonably usable and free vector drawing application
that saves in SVG (of a sort)
That it's arguably problematic won't stop people from wanting to do
it, any more than tag soup being a parsing nightmare will stop people
from doing the tagsoup->render->tagsoup->render->looks-ok method of
HTML writing.

And on a hostile Internet, user agents have to be able to cope well
with arbitrary rubbish which may well be malicious, not just
badly-formed; I don't see that safely parsing SVG is an intrinsically
trickier problem than criminal spammers throwing every piece of toxic
waste they can come up with at your user agent.

[Inkscape is so prevalent for SVG drawing that Wikimedia has seriously
considered using Inkscape in command-line mode as the default SVG
renderer rather than rsvg, even if it is half the speed and uses a
bucketload more memory. A user agent that handles SVG will likely need
to be able to cope with almost anything Inkscape throws at it.]


- d.