Time-based modifications to the elements can be described in SMIL, or can be programmed in a scripting language (e.g.

SVG drawings can be dynamic and interactive. SVG has the information needed to place each glyph and image in a chosen location on a printed page. It contains provisions for rich graphics, and is compatible with CSS for styling purposes. Though the SVG Specification primarily focuses on vector graphics markup language, its design includes the basic capabilities of a page description language like Adobe's PDF.

SVG 2 incorporates several new features in addition to those of SVG 1.1 and SVG Tiny 1.2. Scalable Vector Graphics 2 became a W3C Candidate Recommendation on 15 September 2016. There are two 'Mobile SVG Profiles,' SVG Tiny and SVG Basic, meant for mobile devices with reduced computational and display capabilities. The SVG specification was updated to version 1.1 in 2011. Text, including internationalization and localization, appearing in plain text within the SVG DOM, enhances the accessibility of SVG graphics. SVG uses CSS for styling and JavaScript for scripting. SVG drawings can be interactive and can include animation, defined in the SVG XML elements or via scripting that accesses the SVG Document Object Model (DOM). The feature set includes nested transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects and template objects. Graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and composited into previously rendered objects. SVG allows three types of graphic objects: vector graphic shapes (such as paths consisting of straight lines and curves), bitmap images, and text.

The early SVG Working Group decided not to develop any of the commercial submissions, but to create a new markup language that was informed by but not really based on any of them. SVG has been in development within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999 after six competing proposals for vector graphics languages had been submitted to the consortium during 1998 (see below). In the picture, scaling the bitmap reveals the pixels while scaling the vector image preserves the shapes. The bitmap image is composed of a fixed set of pixels, while the vector image is composed of a fixed set of shapes. This image illustrates the difference between bitmap and vector images.

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