At the W3C Advisory Group in Geneva in June 1998, it was decided to set up a working group to formulate Recommendations in this area. Vincent Quint of INRIA demonstrated Web Schematics in Amaya at the meeting.

The new Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group held a 2-day meeting in Bristol in November 1998 and Chris Lilley reported on progress at the W3C Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Event in London in December 1998. He reported that the first draft of SVG, the new XML DTD for scalable vector graphics, would be discussed at a meeting in San Jose in the New Year. Meanwhile the CGM Web Profile was close to completion.

Chris Lilley at RSA, December 1998

David Duce demonstrates Web Schematics to Chris Lilley and others at RSA, December 1998

Jon Ferraiolo of Adobe became the Editor for the SVG Requirements document.

The first public draft of SVG came out on 11th February 1999 with Jon Ferraiolo as editor.

The document states that properties which are visual in nature could be specified as CSS properties while those that were regarded as SVG content would be defined just as SVG attributes.

CSS 1.0 became a Recommendation in December 1996 and in December 1997 Bert Bos stated that work was proceeding towards CSS 2.0 with the objective:

  • A simple declarative language that represents document style
  • Separation between style and document content
  • Style is specified at several levels (cascade)
  • Allows document content to be device independent

Author Server Client Reader

The initial draft of SVG contained no declarative animation support but the grouping, path descriptions and CSS properties were already quite similar to what finally emerged as SVG 1.0.

The declarative animation facilities were defined in the 30 July 1999 Draft.

Both CSS styling and SVG attributes for rendering appeared in the August 2000 Draft. Presentation attributes were added to allow XSLT transformations to easily produce fully styled SVG content without the need of CSS. Unfortunately the decision was made that browsers that support CSS should allow the CSS property to take precedence over the SVG rendering attribute. That decision was made because the Adobe SVG plugin would have been significantly delayed if the SVG content attributes had taken precedence over the CSS styling.

The SVG 1.0 Recommendation finally arrived on 4 September 2001.