Designing SVG Web Graphics

Essential Building Blocks

This chapter introduces the basic elements that SVG provides to allow you to fully define the parts of an SVG image. You do want to have full control over how your image looks, don’t you? Then you need to understand how to control these basic SVG elements.

These basic graphic elements are not visually exciting—they are, for want of a better term, just basic. However, you should understand and master them. Just as an artistic masterpiece, perhaps the Mona Lisa, is made up of hundreds and hundreds of basic brush strokes, sophisticated SVG images—whether they are static or include animation or interaction—are composed of several or dozens or even hundreds of SVG elements. If the image is deficient in some respect, you ...