WEB DEVELOPERS: Vector Graphics in a Web Browser?

Kind of an arcane question, but here goes…

I need to get a reasonable understanding of the various options that are available out there that would allow a web developer to generate vector-based graphics to a web browser. (Vector-based, in terms of things like lines, polygons, text, graphics attributes, fonts, etc…).

I’ve run across something called SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), which I believe I understand, but there must be other alternatives out there, right? (SVG might work for my needs, but there might be some problems with downloading the SVG Viewer needed to render the SVG syntax on the client side.)

I want to be able to generate complex business graphics in a web browser, and I need fine control over fonts, font sizing, color, etc… I’d also like to be able to resize the browser window and have the graphics also scale/resize accordingly (X-Y scaling would be coupled so that aspect ratio would remain the same). Of course, I can always splat a PDF into a web browser, and I get scaling and fonts and all of that, but for now, let’s assume that PDFs aren’t an option.

Thanks for any and all info…

Flash is a vector-based format, and can be generated dynamically. I prefer working with SVG, though.

Is SVG now a de-facto standard out there now? I’m also assuming that browsers are not SVG-enabled out of the box yet, and that an SVG plug-in is still required? Any key technical issues that you can pass along with regards to SVG that are potential show-stoppers if not understood or handled properly?

Many thanks…

One more thing - the graphics I’m talking about will not need to be generated dynamically, in a just-in-time or “give it to me now” scenario. Rather, they’ll usually be generated offline somewhere via another process, with the SVG syntax either written to .svg files, or imbedded in HTML files, and then these files will be sent over to the web client when needed or requeste by some yet-to-be-designed web app. Hope that made sense…

IE has builtin support for VML. I’m not sure if this ever caught on. Here is a little experiment I did with it one time which I never bothered to make sure worked on all browsers (e.g. don’t expect it to work right on anything but IE).

(you can change the num=x and annotate=true parameters on the url to affect the behavior)

Your best bet is to use Flash. SVG, while interesting, doesn’t have nearly the installed base that Flash does. The software has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to it you can see some really cool stuff.

Another vote for Flash. Almost everyone already has the Flash plugin and more importantly, there is great technical support available from the Macromedia website, from Macromedia users (the Flash developer newsgroup rocks) and from places like Flashkit.