Programmer Musings

SVG Lives: the 3D Graphics Claim

This is the next in a series of posts refuting some recurring claims about the death of SVG, In the first post, I gave a brief overview of SVG. Each subsequent post takes a claim and refutes it.

The Claim

SVG is useless because it doesn't support even basic 3D features

This claim makes a little more sense than the previous one, but not much. The focus of SVG was on 2 dimensional vector graphics. It is obviously possible to render 3D objects by projecting them onto a 2D representation. After all, that's how 3D graphics are always displayed on a monitor. You can use SVG as the 2D representation. However, SVG does not provide any particular help for projections or 3D objects, because its focus is 2D graphics..

All of the image manipulation supported by SVG is designed to support 2D vector graphics. This means that there is no support for perspectives or non-linear transforms. The painting model does not support explicit z-ordering. There is no support for 3D coordinates. None of these things are required for 2D vector graphics, so they do not exist in SVG.

There are some separate projects that target 3D vector formats (VRML and X3D are probably the most complete). X3D has even been written with a goal of being compatible with SVG.

The fact that SVG doesn't support 3D does not reduce its utility as a 2D vector image format. Despite this claim, SVG is still alive and well.

Next time: The Video/Audio Claim