What Is a Viewer?

An SVG viewer is actually a standalone product. The original Web browsers, such as Mosaic (if you can remember back that far—ancient history!), were HTML-only browsers. SVG viewers are comprised of an XML parser, a CSS parser that includes the versions of CSS it supports, and an SVG rendering engine that can draw the necessary graphics. Sometimes, these viewers also offer printer capabilities.

Interactive SVG viewers for the most part support ECMAScript (JavaScript).

The viewers we will be examining in this chapter are:

  • Batik

  • CSIRO

  • Mozilla SVG

  • X-Smiles

Batik

Visit the Batik Web site (Batik is part of the apache.org site) and download the binary version of the program, not the developer version, for this exercise. It can be found ...

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