Introduction

Since many years I am interested in computer graphics. In the many years before, this means to learn special graphics APIs. Borlands Turbopascal is an example of the past, Microsofts DirectX API family we have even today. And don't forget the world of X11. One could do great things with these APIs, but always in a special way.

Fortunately, there came up graphic standards like GKS as an part of history, or the OpenGL used at many places. These standards make it possible to make graphics in a common way on many plattforms. (be assumed that an implementation exists).

But standards have a drawback: they evolve much more slowly in comparision to graphics technology. And these examples indicated above does not liberate the user to have an special software running: a driver or a library .

So this was my starting point. In the last years, there comming an other kind of graphics standard into life: SVG and VRML (or X3D as its successor). They have the advantage, that they extend the web browser, which is almost every where and from its nature the common piece of software, to graphic world. In other words, SVG and X3D make it possible now to make graphics but need nothing more than a web browser to see them.

So far so good. The real life of course provides some obstacles: not every browser can display SVG without a special plug in, as far as I know no browser can display X3D or VRML from the start. But the situation as become much better since Apple's Safari and the Open Source browser FireFox have at least SVG build in.

So this is the time, to examine what can really done with SVG. I want to have the possibility to make graphics and not to be bothered about libraries or any special API. I want to make graphics and every one with a web browser can use and see the results.

Wait - "use" ? Yes, I want to build interactive graphics. In fact, a full fledged GUi is the goal. See the other pages of this wiki how this should be done and which role the Philosophers Erlang SVG Server is intended to play.

next: Characterization of SVG