The introduction of inline image support in the Mosaic web browser in the mid-1990s breathed life into otherwise staid pages of hypertext. Yet other than a few changes in bitmap formats, from GIF to JPEG and PNG, very few truly revolutionary advances have occurred in web graphics. In recent years, SVG (W3C’s Structured Vector Graphics format) has slowly been gaining adoption — for example, for external images in Wikipedia pages.

HTML5 takes a major step forward with vector graphics support by incorporating two approaches:

  • Inline SVG: the ability to place SVG markup directly into your HTML

  • The <canvas> element: ...

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