Programmer Musings

SVG Lives: the Video/Audio 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 video or audio.

It's time to go back to our original SVG definition. SVG is, first and foremost, a vector image format. Although SVG does provide some animation support, it is not a multimedia control language. The ability to play external video or audio is not necessary for doing 2D vector graphics. While this ability may be nice, it has nothing to do with SVG's design goals.

Saying this is a flaw in SVG is more or less equivalent to saying the JPEG format is useless because it doesn't support playing external audio. No one would seriously expect a raster image format to play external audio. That does not stop this claim for the death of SVG.

Many people have done very impressive work making animations with SVG. Although, the full SMIL language was designed to coordinate multimedia presentations, SVG only included a subset that was appropriate to animating vector graphics. While powerful, this subset does not include the ability to play external video or audio.

The fact that SVG has no support for video or audio playback doesn't impact its use in static vector images or even animated vector images. Despite the claim, SVG is strong and healthy.

Next time: The Internet Explorer Claim