World Wide Web Consortium Releases SVG Tiny 1.2 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation; 2D Vector Graphics Ready to Implement on All Types of Devices.

http://www.w3.org/ -- Furthering its mission of enriching access to the Web through mobile devices, and in support of the rapidly growing market for diverse mobile devices, W3C has published a milestone draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a graphics standard suitable for both mobile and desktop devices. SVG, an XML-based format, enables the creation of interactive two-dimensional vector graphics and animations. The latest version of the standard, SVG 1.2 or SVG Tiny, is small enough for mobile devices and powerful enough for the desktop.

"With people demanding rich, interactive graphical display of information on a handset, it's become critical for applications developers to have a graphical format that is truly Web enabled, with real-time update over a network and event-based interactivity," explained Chris Lilley, W3C Interaction Domain and Graphics Activity Lead. "SVG Tiny 1.2 introduces important features and refinements based on deployment experience with the very successful SVG Tiny 1.1."

Publication of SVG Tiny 1.2 as a Candidate Recommendation is a signal that there is broad consensus on the technical content of the document. SVG Tiny is already being implemented; W3C now invites implementation experience from the community as an integral part of the W3C standardization process.

SVG's Established Record Now Improved for Mobile Devices

SVG already benefits from wide adoption in mobile telephones, commercial mobile services, and in desktop browsers such as Opera and Firefox, which now ship with native support for SVG. In 2003, responding to industry demand and requests from the SVG developer community, the SVG Working Group introduced SVG Tiny, designed for mobile devices. SVG Tiny 1.1 provides an open standard solution for delivering graphical content that works equally well on handsets and desktops.

SVG Tiny 1.2 introduces video, audio, gradients, stroke and fill opacity, styled text, and scripting capabilities into mobile devices. As the core of SVG 1.2, SVG Tiny 1.2 is implementable on a range of devices including desktop and laptop computers, cellphones, micro PCs, in-car media centers and entertainment consoles. SVG Tiny 1.2 helps enhance the mobile Web experience, a fundamental goal of W3C and its Mobile Web Initiative (MWI).

Industry and Other Standards Bodies Poised to Adopt New Standard

Since SVG Tiny was first published, mobile device capabilities have expanded in exciting ways; industry leaders and other standards organizations have looked to W3C to expand upon the SVG Tiny profile and have lent their support for the format, including commitments to incorporate SVG Tiny 1.2 into their own requirements. These commitments and other information about support for SVG can be found on the SVG testimonials page.

SVG Tiny 1.2 is expected to be incorporated into profiles developed within 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 6, and the Open Mobile Terminal Platform has made SVG one of the core requirements for browsers.

The W3C Compound Documents Format Working Group uses SVG Tiny 1.2 along with XHTML Basic to form the Web Integration Compound Document (WICD), which is being evaluated as a key component of OMA's Rich Media UI and 3GPP Dynamic Interactive Multimedia Scenes (DIMS).

SVG Tiny 1.2 was produced with the help of industry leaders and invited experts in graphics, mobile computing, and the Web working together. They include Adobe Systems Inc., Canon, Inc., Ericsson, Expway, Groupe des Ecoles de Telecommunications, Ikivo AB, ILOG, S.A., ITEDO Software GmbH, KDDI Corporation, Mercurial Communications Inc., Nokia, BitFlash Division of Open Text, Opera Software, Research In Motion, Ltd. (RIM), Sharp Corporation, Streamezzo, Sun Microsystems, Inc., ETH Zurich, Telecom Italia SpA, and Vectoreal.

About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 400 organizations are Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan,and has additional Offices worldwide. For more information see http://www.w3.org/