Summary

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Overview

This chapter presents some of the SVG documents that are available on the companion CD-ROM, but without a detailed discussion of the SVG code. Since the CD-ROM contains more than 20,000 SVG documents, only a small fraction of those samples can be included in this chapter. The selection process was based on several factors, such as color combinations, coding techniques, and aesthetic appeal. Some examples have an interesting visual effect, even though the underlying code is very simple; other examples might pique your interest in the technical details for creating specific effects. The documents were also selected based on several viewpoints. For instance, your viewpoint for evaluating the samples might be as a programmer/Web developer, as an artist, or perhaps as a technical neophyte who enjoys pleasant 'eye candy.' Some samples are interesting even though it is difficult to articulate the reason for their visceral appeal; to the extent that this is true, graphics resembles art. Nevertheless, determining the quality of a graphics image tends to be a subjective process, and this determination is ultimately based on your own tastes and needs.

The CD-ROM is organized in a systematic fashion whereby the files in each directory will illustrate a specific feature. In some cases, you will find similar variants of the same curve; that is, two examples might only differ by their color scheme. The rationale for including both samples is that either they illustrate a coding technique that will be useful and easy to enhance, or they produce vivid, interesting variations of each other. The other reason for their inclusion is that it's very convenient and advantageous to you in terms of time and effort; that is, viewing an SVG document requires no more than a double mouse click, whereas code changes (even simple ones) require significantly more time.

The directories with the string 'shadow' contain samples with a shadow effect of the corresponding SVG documents in the associated directory. For example, the sub-folder coreShadowPattern contains samples with shadow effects, and these samples correspond to the samples in the sub-folder corePattern.

An additional important aspect of many of the SVG samples is that they contain 'commented out' code. This feature is useful and convenient because you can see a different image simply be re-enabling one or two lines of code. For example, you might find multiple consecutive lines of 'commented out' code, each of which contains variants on the style attribute for a particular geometric object. The inclusion of this code allows you to make code modifications quickly and easily.

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