When the World Wide Web was defined, there was no support for vector graphics. The best that was available was turning your schematic drawing into a GIF or relying on a proprietary plugin that was either poor in concept or misguided in implementation. CGM was available through a number of plugins from reliable providers but they were all different.
The break through came at the W3C Advisory Committe Meeting in May 1995 at the Hyatt Regency at San Francisco Airport. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) proposed that W3C should work with ISO to produce a Web Profile for CGM and this was accepted. (At the time, the major item on the Agenda was the status of HTML 2.0!).
The main opposition came from Adobe who believed that a PDF Web profile catered for all the needs of that community.
An initial meeting between W3C and CGM Open was held in San Jose in January 1998. Chris Lilley felt there was not a need for a W3C Working Group to develop the CGM Web Profile but that responsibility could be left with CGM Open. Roy Platon of RAL became the CGM Web Profile Editor. The profile was largely based on the ATA (Air Transport Association) CGM profile (GREXCHANGE 2.4) with Dave Cruikshank (Boeing) and Lofton Henderson (Larson Software Technology) working with Roy Platon, the Editor.
The WebCGM Profile became an ISO standard and a W3C Recommendation in January 1999.
History of the CGM Web Profile can be found at CGM Open.
The current version (March 2010) is WebCGM 2.1 and is both an OASIS and W3C Recommendation.
Larson Software Technology is still heavily involved in the development of CGM-based products.
The CGM Web Profile gave the engineering community a standard way of interchanging graphical information on the web.
However, it was not compatible with the arising influence of XML-based documents on the web. XML 1.0 had been released in February 1998 but a draft of the specification was available at the Sixth WWW Conference in Santa Clara in April 1997.