BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2000 > June
Scalable Vector Graphics
By Jon Udell
June 14, 2000
(Scalable Vector Graphics
: Page 1 of 3 )
In the January 17, 2000 column, Simple Charting For The Web, we looked at ways to rasterize charts, but concluded with a down-to-earth example that used nothing fancier than an HTML table to form a bar chart. The HTML approach wasn't just simpler, it was arguably better. For example, each of its datapoints could trivially be linked to detail reports. It's much harder to achieve this drill-down effect in raster space.
I mentioned then that SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) was poised to become, among other things, the next incarnation of this Web-native approach to charting. Last week, with the release of the 1.0 version of Adobe's SVG viewer, that option began to look imminent. Here's a picture of an SVG version of the chart from the January column, viewed in MSIE with the Adobe SVG plug-in.
Example 1: SVG version of chart,
viewed in the Adobe plug-in
(click to enlarge)
SVG source for the chart
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Creating the SVG version of the chart is a lot like creating the HTML version -- and that's a very good thing. As with HTML, there are all sorts of construction techniques: you can write the stuff by hand in a text editor, you can write scripts to automate parts of that process, or you can use WYSIWYG editors to build it interactively. Web developers already familiar with CSS styling and scripted, template-driven HTML construction will find themselves immediately productive with SVG.
For example, I started building this week's example in Next page
BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2000 > June
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