Chapter Sixteen: SVG and the Canvas: Rich Graphics in the Browser

For over a decade, browsers have supported a range of bitmap image formats (such as GIF, PNG, and JPG) natively, but the search for a standard, widely supported, native vector image format for the web continues to this day. Though not widely used for this purpose, Flash has provided vector web graphics since the mid 1990s in every browser that supports the Flash plug-in.

In 1998, Microsoft and Macromedia proposed VML (Vector Markup Language) as a W3C standard for vector graphics. Around the same time, Adobe, Sun Microsystems, and others proposed the competing PGML (Precision Graphics Markup Language) format. In the end, neither PGML nor VML were adopted. Instead, in 1999, the ...

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