Vector Artwork on Websites

Can it be done, and if so, what browser support does it have?

[MatthewHSE]

I'm not very experienced in graphics work, but I do know that vector art is supposed to be able to be resized to any dimensions without any loss of quality. Obviously, this would be handy to webmasters, as we could then specify image dimensions in percents, rather than pixels, giving even more fluidity to our designs. So my question is, can vector art be used on websites, and if so, what kind of browser support does it have?

Thanks,

Matthew

[Raymond]

You may want to take a look at this:
[naltabyte.se...]

[limbo]

AFAIK there is no support for vector graphics at the moment apart from flash player(version?). It will let you scale both static images and animated movies using vectors. But there are all the asscociated problems with swf files and usability & accessibility to consider.

Programs such as the one suggested above might be the way to go - but it looks a little primitive in it's capabilities.

You can set % widths for images now - but relying on a browser to do a good job of the resize is risky.

What effect are you tring to achieve? or are you hypothesising around the possibilities ;)

Ta

Limbo

[choster]

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), [w3.org...] , is an XML language for describing vector graphics.

Browser support for SVG is not widespread. Most users would have to install a plug-in (Adobe's is the most popular, but far from widespread).

[MatthewHSE]

>> or are you hypothesising around the possibilities ;)

That's it! :)

I just got into making fluid designs a short time ago, and thought it would be "the best of both worlds" if we could specify percents for images. I know that can already be done, but quality is always hideously low when a .jpg or a .gif is resized in the browser. Specifying in percents would solve some layout problems, but for now it looks like we're stuck! Bummer . . .

[mattr555]

I played with SVG and its a shame its not more widely supported. I had a fully fluid layout where all the content areas, margins, padding etc all scaled up and down with the text but the only thing tha looked flakey were the images. When I replaced my GIF logo with an SVG one, it looked fantastic but I couldnt rely on everyone having SVG support so had to abandon it. The only other option is Flash but i'm really not keen to use that and it's hard to embed a flash file and retain valid xhtml markup.

[MatthewHSE]

What happens if a user doesn't have the SVG plugin installed? I assume the graphic just doesn't display?

[limbo]

yep.

SVG support uses a placeholder like flash player. So no plugin > no image.

You could probably create a script that 'sniffed' the plugin and offered and alternative bitmap in it's place.