Conventions in This Book

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Overview

This chapter serves as your gentle introduction to SVG. If you are an experienced SVG developer, you need only skim through this chapter. If you are relatively new to SVG and/or programming, you will learn some of the fundamental concepts that underlie the SVG code in this book. Please glance through the appendices; at a minimum, you will become aware of their contents, thereby enabling you to locate quickly the relevant information in case you need to review it.

The first part of this chapter delves into the role of SVG on the Web, and also the rationale behind using SVG instead of other alternatives.

The second part of this chapter provides the necessary information for downloading an SVG viewer from the Adobe® home page. The introduction to this book contains a useful link, http://www.w3.org, that (in turn) summarizes many available SVG viewers and information about where you can download them.

The third part of this chapter provides an introductory view of SVG documents and the SVG coordinate system that will assist you in visualizing the SVG code for rendering objects such as lines, rectangles, and polygons. As you start learning about SVG documents, you can also refer to Appendix B, which can help you with basic XML. If you are already familiar with these topics, then you can quickly skim through this section.

The fourth part of this chapter introduces you to the SVG style element, which enables you to specify attributes such as fill colors, fonts, and borders ('stroke'). Various combinations of these attributes are used when creating rectangles by means of various SVG elements such as rect, path, and polygon. You will learn how to use the opacity attribute in order to control the color 'density' of rendered graphics images.

The fifth part of the chapter contains an introduction to colors and shows four ways of representing colors in SVG. The use of color is of paramount importance for displaying graphics images, and so you need to know how to use standard colors and their many subtle shades. Later, in Chapter 2, you'll learn how to specify so-called linear and radial gradients that imbue graphics images with an aesthetically rich appearance. As you'll see, the set of possible colors exceeds sixteen million, which ought to satisfy most color requirements for graphics images.

Finally, the code for all of the chapters in this book can be found on the companion CD-ROM under the folder that corresponds to the chapter number.

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