For you philosophers out there, I pose the following question: “If an SVG breaks, and there’s no one there to see it?”
The W3C, the people who determine the stuff between your <HTML TAGS> recently recommended the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Specification.
What this is in plain English is just that, graphics you put on your site not with some big honking binary file such as a .GIF or .JPG, but instead, using the miracle of XML, you essentially tell the target browser how to MAP the image using plain old text (well, plain old text written in a computer to computer sorta way).
Unfortunately, this bandwidth beneficial technology isn’t getting all that much attention. The biggest problem I see is two-fold.
First, is what I call the proverbial plug-in problem. Many people are just too darn afraid to upgrade their browsers to include the tools necessary to see the images, such as Adobe’s SVG Viewer. If people won’t install this puppy, then why should I design for it?
Second. I used to say the second problem was cheap-easy-to-use native editors and coverters, but they’re out there now. No, now the problem is marketing. Where is the massive effort by the browser big-boys to tell people to upgrade and use this technology?
About the only way I think I might implement this technology is if I had some monsterously a large graphics that couldn’t be rendered any other way than to ask someone to download the viewer … but if I had to do that, then why not ask the user to install another vectoring program that has a broader appeal … Flash ?
