Table 1 Advantages of using SVG in graphics design

• Pure text (can be modified by a wide range of simple tools) and is searchable

• Smaller and more compressible than image files

• Scalable (do not lose quality when zoom or resize maps)

• High quality printing at any resolution

• Open standard (not proprietary so is freely available)

• Pure XML, human readable

• Animation possible by combining with JAVASCRIPT

• Support from major industries (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Adobe)

• A W3C recommendation. To work with other W3C recommendations such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DOM (Document Object Model) and SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language)