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)

Kamadjeu and Tolentino International Journal of Health Geographics 2006 5:24   doi:10.1186/1476-072X-5-24