An SVG document fragment consists of any number of SVG elements contained within an 'svg' element, including the 'svg' element.
An SVG document fragment can range from an empty fragment (i.e., no content inside of the 'svg' element), to a very simple SVG document fragment containing a single SVG graphics element such as a 'rect', to a complex, deeply nested collection of container elements and graphics elements.
An SVG document fragment can stand by itself as a self-contained file or resource, in which case the SVG document fragment is an SVG document, or it can be embedded inline as a fragment within a parent XML document.
The following example shows simple SVG content embedded inline as a fragment within a parent XML document. Note the use of XML namespaces to indicate that the 'svg' and 'ellipse' elements belong to the SVG namespace:
This example shows a slightly more complex (i.e., it contains multiple rectangles) stand-alone, self-contained SVG document:
An SVG document fragment can only contain one single 'svg' element, this means that 'svg' elements cannot appear in the middle of SVG content.
In all cases, for compliance with either the Namespaces in XML 1.0 or Namespaces in XML 1.1 Recommendations [XML-NS10, XML-NS], an SVG namespace declaration must be in scope for the 'svg' element, so that all SVG elements are identified as belonging to the SVG namespace.
For example, an 'xmlns' attribute without a prefix could be specified on an 'svg' element, which means that SVG is the default namespace for all elements within the scope of the element with the 'xmlns' attribute:
If a namespace prefix is specified on the 'xmlns'
attribute (e.g., xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"), then
the corresponding namespace is not the default namespace, so an
explicit namespace prefix must be assigned to the elements:
Namespace declarations can also be specified on ancestor elements (illustrated in example 05_01, above). For more information, refer to the Namespaces in XML 1.0 or Namespaces in XML 1.1 Recommendations [XML-NS10, XML-NS].
Attribute definitions:
Indicates the SVG language version to which this document fragment conforms.
In SVG 1.0 and SVG 1.1 this attribute had the value '1.0' or '1.1' respectively, and SVG 1.2 adds the value '1.2'. See rules for version processing for further instructions, notably on handling of unsupported values.
Modifying the 'version' attribute using the DOM does not cause any change in behavior. In this case, the original value of the attribute is the one used for document processing.
Animatable: no.
Describes the minimum SVG language profile that the author believes is necessary to correctly render the content. See rules for baseProfile processing for further instructions.
This specification defines the values 'none' and 'tiny'. The value 'full' corresponds to all features in the SVG language; for SVG 1.1, this corresponds to the language features defined in the SVG 1.1 Specification [SVG11]. The value 'basic' was defined in the Mobile SVG Profiles: SVG Tiny and SVG Basic [SVGM11]. This specification corresponds to baseProfile="tiny" and version="1.2". A value of 'none' provides no information about the minimum language profile that is necessary to render the content.
The lacuna value is 'none'.
Modifying the 'baseProfile' attribute using the DOM does not cause any change in behavior. In this case, the original value of the attribute is the one used for document processing.
Animatable: no.
The intrinsic width of the SVG document fragment. Together with the 'height', 'viewBox' and 'preserveAspectRatio' attributes it defines the intrinsic aspect ratio and (unless both width and height are percentages) the intrinsic size of the svg element. See The initial viewport.
A negative value is unsupported. A value of zero disables rendering of the element.
The lacuna value is '100%'.
Animatable: yes.
The intrinsic height of the SVG document fragment.
A negative value is unsupported. A value of zero disables rendering of the element.
The lacuna value is '100%'.
Animatable: yes.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
Indicates a moment in time which is most relevant for a still-image of the animated SVG content. This time may be used as a hint to the SVG user agent for rendering a still-image of an animated SVG document, such as a preview. A value of 'none' means that no 'snapshotTime' is available. See example 05_22 for an example of using the 'snapshotTime' attribute.
The lacuna value is 'none'.
Animatable: no.
Indicates whether it is possible to seek backwards in the document. In earlier versions of SVG there was no need to put restrictions on the direction of seeking but with the newly introduced facilities for long-running documents (e.g. the 'discard' element) there is sometimes a need to restrict this.
If 'playbackOrder' is set to 'forwardOnly', the content will probably contain 'discard' elements or scripts that destroy resources, thus seeking back in the document's timeline may result in missing content. If 'playbackOrder' is 'forwardOnly', the content should not provide a way, through hyperlinking or script, of seeking backwards in the timeline. Similarly the UA should disable any controls it may provide in the user interface for seeking backwards. Content with 'playbackOrder' = 'forwardOnly' that provides a mechanism for seeking backwards in time may result in undefined behavior or a document that is in error.
The lacuna value is 'all'.
Animatable: no.
Controls the initialization of the timeline for the document.
The 'svg' element controls the document timeline, which is the timeline of the 'svg' element's time container. For progressively loaded animations, the author would typically set this attribute to 'onStart', thus allowing the timeline to begin as the document loads, rather than waiting until the complete document is loaded.
load event for the
rootmost 'svg' element
is triggered.
The lacuna value is 'onLoad'.
Animatable: no.
Identifies the default scripting language for the given document. This attribute sets the default scripting language for all the instances of script in the document fragment. This language must be used for all scripts that do not specify their own scripting language. The <content-type> value specifies a media type, per Multipart Internet Mail Extensions: (MIME) Part Two: Media Types [RFC2046]. The lacuna value is "application/ecmascript".
Animatable: no.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: no.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
See definition.
Note that 'animateMotion' and 'animateTransform' are legal as children to 'svg' but don't apply to their 'svg' parent (since the 'svg' element doesn't have a 'transform' attribute). They only have any effect if the 'xlink:href' attribute is specified so that they target a different element for animation.
Content produced by illustration programs originally targeted at print often has a fixed width and height, which will prevent it scaling for different display resolutions. The first example below has a fixed width and height in pixels, and no 'viewBox'.
Normally, SVG content is designed to be scalable. In order for the SVG content to scale automatically to fill the available viewport, it must include a 'viewBox' attribute on the 'svg' element. This describes the region of world coordinate space (the initial user coordinate system) used by the graphic. This attribute thus provides a convenient way to design SVG documents to scale-to-fit into an arbitrary viewport.
The second example is scalable, using a 'viewBox' rather than a fixed width and height.
Below is an example of 'snapshotTime'. An SVG user agent is displaying a number of SVG files in a directory by rendering a thumbnail image. It uses the 'snapshotTime' as the time to render when generating the image, thus giving a more representative static view of the animation. The appearance of the thumbnail for an SVG user agent that honors the 'snapshotTime' and for an SVG user agent that does not is shown below the example (UA which generates thumbnails based on 'snapshotTime' at the left, UA which doesn't generate thumbnails based on 'snapshotTime' at the right, e.g. a static viewer).
The 'g' element is a container element for grouping together related graphics elements.
Grouping constructs, when used in conjunction with the 'desc' and 'title' elements, provide information about document structure and semantics. Documents that are rich in structure may be rendered graphically, as speech, or as braille, and thus promote accessibility.
A group of elements, as well as individual objects, can be given a name using the 'id' or 'xml:id' attribute. Named groups are needed for several purposes such as animation and re-usable objects.
An example:
A 'g' element can contain other 'g' elements nested within it, to an arbitrary depth. Thus, the following is possible:
Any element that is not contained within a 'g' is treated (at least conceptually) as if it were in its own group.
Attribute definitions:
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
See definition.
The 'defs' element is a container element for referenced elements. For understandability and accessibility reasons, it is recommended that, whenever possible, referenced elements be defined inside of a 'defs'. For performance reasons, authors should put the 'defs' element before other document content, so that all resources are available to be referenced.
The content model for 'defs' is the same as for the 'g' element; thus, any element that can be a child of a 'g' can also be a child of a 'defs', and vice versa.
Elements that are descendants of a 'defs' are not rendered directly; they are prevented from becoming part of the rendering tree just as if the 'defs' element were a 'g' element and the 'display' property were set to none. Note, however, that the descendants of a 'defs' are always present in the source tree and can be referenced by other elements. The actual value of the 'display' property on the 'defs' element or any of its descendants does not change the rendering of these elements or prevent these elements from being referenced.
Creators of SVG content are encouraged to place all elements which are targets of local IRI references (except of course for animation targets) within a 'defs' element which is a direct child of one of the ancestors of the referencing element. For example:
In the document above, the linear gradient is defined within a 'defs' element which is the direct child of the 'svg' element, which in turn is an ancestor of the 'rect' element which references the linear gradient. Thus, the above document conforms to the guideline.
The 'discard' element allows authors to specify the time at which particular elements are to be discarded, thereby reducing the resources required by an SVG user agent. This is particularly useful to help SVG viewers conserve memory while displaying long-running documents. This element will not be processed by static SVG viewers.
The 'discard' element may occur wherever the 'animate' element may.
Attribute definitions:
An IRI reference that identifies the target element to discard. See the definition of 'xlink:href' on animation elements for details on identifying a target element.
Note that if the target element is not part of the current SVG document fragment then whether the target element will be removed or not is defined by the host language.
If the 'xlink:href' attribute is not provided, then the target element will be the immediate parent element of the discard element.
Animatable: no.
Indicates when the target element will be discarded. See the definition of 'begin' on animation elements for details.
The lacuna value is '0s'. This indicates that the target element should be discarded immediately once the document begins.
Animatable: no.
The 'discard'
element has an implicit
simple duration
of "indefinite". As soon as the element's
active duration
starts, the SVG user agent
discards the element identified by the
'xlink:href'
attribute ([SMIL21], section 10.4.3).
The removal operation acts as if the method
removeChild were
called on the parent of the target element with the target element as
parameter. The SVG user agent
must remove the target node as well as all of its attributes and descendants.
After removal of the target element, the 'discard' element is no longer useful. It must also be discarded following the target element removal. If the 'xlink:href' attribute has an invalid IRI reference (the target element did not exist, for example), the 'discard' element itself must still be removed following activation.
Seeking backwards in the timeline ([SMIL21], section 10.4.3) must not re-insert the discarded elements. Discarded elements are intended to be completely removed from memory. So, authors are encouraged to set the 'playbackOrder' attribute to "forwardOnly" when using the 'discard' element.
The 'discard' element itself can be discarded prior to its activation, in which case it will never trigger the removal of its own target element. SVG user agents must allow the 'discard' element to be the target of another 'discard' element.
The following example demonstrates a simple usage of the 'discard' element. The list below describes relevant behavior in the document timeline of this example:
Each container element or graphics element in an SVG document may contain one or more of each of the 'title' and 'desc' descriptive elements, which together comprise a sort of heading and summary of the containing element. The 'title' element must contain a brief plain text passage representing the title for the container or graphics element containing it. This short title must provide information supplementary to the rendering of the element, but will normally not be sufficient to replace it. The 'desc' element must contain a longer, more detailed plain text description for the container or graphics element containing it. This description, along with the content of the 'title' element, must be usable as replacement content for cases when the user cannot see the rendering of the SVG element for whatever reason.
Authors should always provide at least a 'title', and preferably a 'desc', as an immediate child element to the 'svg' element within an SVG document, and to every significant individual graphical composition within the document. The 'title' child element to an 'svg' element serves the purposes of identifying the content of the given SVG document fragment. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as "Introduction", which doesn't provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as "Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping" instead. For reasons of accessibility, SVG user agents should always make the content of the 'title' child element to the 'svg' element available to users (See the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [UAAG]). The mechanism for doing so depends on the SVG user agent (e.g., as a caption, spoken). If for any reason, a graphical presentation of the document is not available, the rootmost descriptive elements may represent the complete document and its purpose in a textual manner, and authors should supply meaningful content accordingly.
When descriptive elements are present, alternate presentations of the document are possible, both visual and aural, which display the 'title' and 'desc' elements but do not display graphics elements.
For both the 'title' and the 'desc' element, the content must be plain text. To provide structured data in other markup languages, authors should use the 'metadata' or 'foreignObject' elements instead, as appropriate. When markup is included as a child of the 'title' or the 'desc', a user agent should present only the text content of the descriptive elements.
Note that the 'title' element is distinct in purpose from the 'xlink:title' attribute of the 'a' element. The 'xlink:title' attribute content is intended not to describe the current resource, but the nature of the linked resource.
Normally, the descriptive elements that describe a container element or graphics element are direct children of that element. However, SVG documents can have a rich structure, with nested elements each potentially containing 'title' or 'desc' child elements, as well as 'use' elements with 'title' or 'desc' in both the 'use' element itself and in the referenced content. Because of this complex structure, and because the descriptive elements may or may not be present at any given level, the applicable descriptive elements for any given content is determined by the structure, as described here.
For each container element or graphics element, the applicable descriptive elements shall be those which are most shallowly nested in that document fragment, without taking into account descriptive elements in any 'use' element shadow trees. If the document fragment has no descriptive elements, and it is a 'use' element, the applicable descriptive elements shall be those contained in the shadow tree. If no descriptive elements are found in the document fragment or any shadow tree, the applicable descriptive elements shall be the nearest ancestor descriptive elements. This algorithm allows authors to reuse descriptive elements defined in referenced resources when desired, or to override them as needed, as well as to describe whole groups of elements. Note that the 'title' and 'desc' are not necessarily always paired (i.e., in the same document hierarchy level), and if the user agent should stop searching for an applicable descriptive element if only one or the other is encountered at a particular hierarchy level.
Note that the applicable descriptive elements for elements in a container element does not necessarily entail a description of the individual graphical elements in question, but rather their membership in a more inclusive group (e.g., if the image is of a basket of fruit, with a title of "Fruit Basket" for the containing group and no other descriptive elements, while no one piece of fruit is a fruit basket, the title would still be applicable through inclusion). In essence, there is a difference between container elements and graphics elements when it comes to determining the applicability of a descriptive element; a 'title' or 'desc' for a graphics element should be assumed to apply only to that element, while a 'title' or 'desc' for a 'g' may apply to each of the children of that group. Authors should take care to designate all important elements with their own descriptive elements to avoid misconstrued identities and entailments.
It is strongly recommended that authors use at most one 'title' and at most one 'desc' element as an immediate child of any particular element, and that these elements appear before any other child elements (except possibly 'metadata' elements) or character data content.
Authors may wish to deliberately provide multiple descriptive elements, such as to provide alternate content for different languages. In this case, the author should use conditional processing attributes to allow the user agent to select the best choice according to the user's preferences. For example, the 'systemLanguage' attribute, with or without the 'switch' element, will determine the applicable descriptive elements.
If an SVG user agent needs to choose among multiple 'title' or 'desc' elements for processing (e.g., to decide which string to use for a tooltip), and if any available conditional processing attributes are insufficient to resolve the best option, the user agent must choose the first of each of the available descriptive elements as the applicable 'title' and 'desc'.
When the current SVG document fragment is rendered as SVG on visual media, 'title' and 'desc' elements are not rendered as part of the canvas. Often, the intent of authors is for descriptive elements to remain hidden (e.g., for aesthetic reasons in pieces of art). However, other authors may wish for this content to be displayed, and providing tangible benefit to these authors encourages best practice in providing descriptive elements. In this case, authors are encouraged to use the 'role' attribute, with the value tooltip ([ARIA], section 4.4.1) to indicate their intent. Future SVG specifications may define an explicit mechanism for indicating whether a tooltip should be displayed.
In order to honor authorial intent, it is strongly recommended that when, and only when, the appropriate 'role' attribute value is present, user agents display the text content of the applicable 'title' and 'desc' elements in a highly visible manner supported by the user agent, such as in a tooltip or status bar, when the pointing device is hovered over the described element or elements, or when the described element is given focus (e.g., through keyboard or pointer navigation). If a tooltip is provided, the user agent is recommended to display the applicable title and descriptions on separate lines, title first, with font styling that distinguishes the two. For long descriptions, the tooltip may wrap the text, and truncate longer passages to a reasonable length. A user agent may preserve spaces and line breaks in the text content in order to structure the presentation of the text.
When an element with descriptive elements is itself the child of an 'a' element with an 'xlink:title' attribute, the user agent should display as much of the available information as possible. The user agent is suggested to display the 'xlink:title' attribute value on a separate line, with a label to identify it, such as "link: ". Commonly, many user agents display the URI of the link (i.e., the value of the 'xlink:href' attribute) in the status bar or other display area. This information is important, and should not be overridden by any descriptive element content, but may be supplemented by such content.
The rootmost 'title' element should be used as the document title, and for stand-alone SVG documents, the title should not be displayed as a tooltip, but rather in the browser chrome (as appropriate for the user agent). For embedded SVG documents, such as an SVG image referenced in an HTML document, displaying the rootmost title and description as a tooltip is more appropriate, and the user agent should do so.
If a user agent is an accessibility tool, all available descriptions of the currently focused or hovered element should be exposed to the user in a categorical manner, such that the user may selectively access the various descriptions. The 'desc' element, in particular, may be given different semantic distinctions by use of values in the 'role' attribute, such as the ARIA ontology value description ([ARIA], section 4.4.1) for textual equivalents of the graphics (the default role).
The following is an example in which an SVG user agent might present the 'title' and 'desc' elements as a tooltip.
Any 'g' or graphics element is potentially a template object that can be re-used (i.e. "instantiated") in the SVG document via a 'use' element, thus creating an instance tree. The 'use' element references another element and indicates that the graphical contents of that element is to be included and drawn at that given point in the document.
Unlike 'animation', the 'use' element cannot reference entire files.
Besides what is described about the 'use' element in this section important restrictions for 'use' can be found in the Reference Section.
The 'use' element has optional attributes 'x' and 'y' which are used to place the referenced element and its contents into the current coordinate system.
The effect of a 'use' element is as if the SVG element contents of the referenced element were deeply cloned into a separate non-exposed DOM tree which had the 'use' element as its parent and all of the 'use' element's ancestors as its higher-level ancestors. Because the cloned DOM tree is non-exposed, the SVG Document Object Model (DOM) only contains the 'use' element and its attributes. The SVG DOM does not show the referenced element's contents as children of the 'use' element. The deeply-cloned tree, also referred to as the shadow tree, is then kept in synchronization with the contents of the referenced element, so that any animation, DOM manipulation, or non-DOM interactive state occurring on the referenced element are also applied to the 'use' element's deeply-cloned tree.
Relative IRIs
on a node in a shadow tree are resolved relative to any
'xml:base'
on the node itself, then recursively on any
'xml:base'
on its parentNode,
and finally any
'xml:base'
on the ownerDocument
if there is no parentNode.
Property inheritance works as if the referenced element had been textually included as a deeply cloned child of the 'use' element. The referenced element inherits properties from the 'use' element and the 'use' element's ancestors. An instance of a referenced element does not inherit properties from the referenced element's original parents.
The behavior of the 'visibility' property conforms to this model of property inheritance. Thus, a computed value of visibility="hidden" on a 'use' element does not guarantee that the referenced content will not be rendered. If the 'use' element has a computed value of visibility="hidden" and the element it references specifies visibility="hidden" or visibility="inherit", then that element will be hidden. However, if the referenced element instead specifies visibility="visible", then that element will be visible even if the 'use' element specifies visibility="hidden".
If an event listener is registered on a referenced element, then the actual target for the event will be the SVGElementInstance object within the "instance tree" corresponding to the given referenced element.
The event handling for the non-exposed tree works as if the referenced element
had been textually included as a deeply cloned child of the
'use' element,
except that events are dispatched to the
SVGElementInstance
objects. The event's
target and
currentTarget
attributes are set to the
SVGElementInstance
that corresponds to the target and current target elements in the referenced
subtree. An event propagates through the exposed and non-exposed portions of
the tree in the same manner as it would in the regular document tree: first
going to the target of the event, then bubbling back through non-exposed tree
to the 'use'
element and then back through regular tree to the
rootmost 'svg' element
in the bubbling phase.
An element and all its corresponding
SVGElementInstance
objects share an event listener list. The
currentTarget
attribute of the event can be used to determine through which object an event
listener was invoked.
Animations on a referenced element will cause the instances to also be animated.
As listed in the Reference Section the 'use' element is not allowed to reference an 'svg' element.
Except for resolution of relative IRI references as noted and until the referenced elements are modified, a 'use' element has the same visual effect as if the 'use' element were replaced by the following generated content:
Note also that any changes to the used element are immediately reflected in the generated content.
When a 'use' references another element which is another 'use' or whose content contains a 'use' element, then the deep cloning approach described above is recursive. However, a set of references that directly or indirectly reference a element to create a circular dependency is an error, as described in the References section.
Attribute definitions:
The x-axis coordinate of one corner of the rectangular region into which the referenced element is placed.
The lacuna value is '0'.
Animatable: yes.
The y-axis coordinate of one corner of the rectangular region into which the referenced element is placed.
The lacuna value is '0'.
Animatable: yes.
An IRI reference to an element/fragment within an SVG document. An invalid IRI reference is an unsupported value. An empty attribute value (xlink:href="") disables rendering of the element. The lacuna value is the empty string.
Animatable: yes.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
See definition.
Below are two examples of the 'use' element. For another example see use and animation example.
Example 05_13 below has a simple 'use' on a 'rect'.
The visual effect would be equivalent to the following document:
Example 05_17 illustrates what happens when a 'use' has a 'transform' attribute.
The visual effect would be equivalent to the following document:
Example use-bubble-example-1.svg illustrates four cases of event bubbling with use elements. In case 1, all instances of the 'rect' element are filled blue on mouse over. For cases 2 and 3, in addition to the 'rect' elements being filled blue, a black stroke will also appear around the referencing rectangle on mouse over. In case 4, all the rectangles turn blue on mouse over, and a black stroke appears on mouse click.
Example use-bubble-example-2.svg illustrates event bubbling with nested 'use' elements. On mouse over, the 'rect' element is filled blue and displays a green and black ring.
Example image-use-base.svg illustrates the
handling of relative IRI references. All three use elements result in the
same image being displayed, http://a.example.org/aaa/bbb/ddd/foo.jpg.
The 'image' element indicates that the contents of an image are to be rendered into a given rectangle within the current user coordinate system. In SVG Tiny 1.2, the 'image' must reference content that is a raster image format, such as PNG or JPEG [PNG, JPEG]. SVG Tiny 1.2 does not allow an SVG document to be referenced by the 'image' element; instead, authors should use the 'animation' element for referencing SVG documents. Conforming SVG viewers must support PNG and JPEG image file formats. Other image file formats may be supported.
For details of the required JPEG support see the JPEG Support appendix. PNG support is required as defined in the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (Second Edition) [PNG].
The result of processing an 'image' is always a four-channel RGBA result. When an 'image' element references a raster image file such as PNG or JPEG files which only has three channels (RGB), then the effect is as if the object were converted into a 4-channel RGBA image with the alpha channel uniformly set to 1. For a single-channel raster image, the effect is as if the object were converted into a 4-channel RGBA image, where the single channel from the referenced object is used to compute the three color channels and the alpha channel is uniformly set to 1.
The 'image' element supports the 'opacity' property for controlling the image opacity. The 'fill-opacity' property does not affect the rendering of an image.
An 'image' element establishes a new viewport for the referenced file as described in Establishing a new viewport. The bounds for the new viewport are defined by attributes 'x', 'y', 'width' and 'height'. The placement and scaling of the referenced image are controlled by the 'preserveAspectRatio' attribute on the 'image' element.
The value of the 'viewBox' attribute to use when evaluating the 'preserveAspectRatio' attribute is defined by the referenced content. For content that clearly identifies a 'viewBox' that value should be used. For most raster content (such as PNG and JPEG) the bounds of the image should be used (i.e. the 'image' element has an implicit 'viewBox' of "0 0 raster-image-width raster-image-height"). Where no value is readily available the 'preserveAspectRatio' attribute is ignored and only the translate due to the 'x' and 'y' attributes of the viewport is used to display the content.
For example, if the 'image' element referenced a PNG or JPEG and preserveAspectRatio="xMinYMin meet", then the aspect ratio of the raster would be preserved (which means that the scale factor from the image's coordinates to the current user space coordinates would be the same for both x and y), the raster would be sized as large as possible while ensuring that the entire raster fits within the viewport, and the top left of the raster would be aligned with the top left of the viewport as defined by the attributes 'x', 'y', 'width' and 'height' on the 'image' element. If the value of 'preserveAspectRatio' was "none" then aspect ratio of the image would not be preserved. The image would be positioned such that the top-left corner of the raster exactly aligns with coordinate ('x', 'y') and the bottom-right corner of the raster exactly aligns with coordinate ('x'+'width', 'y'+'height').
The SVG specification does not specify when an image that is not being displayed should be loaded. An SVG user agent is not required to load image data for an image that is not displayed (e.g. an image which is outside the initial document viewport), except when that image is contained inside a subtree for which 'externalResourcesRequired' is set to "true". However, it should be noted that this may cause a delay when an image becomes visible for the first time. In the case where an author wants to suggest that the SVG user agent loads image data before it is displayed, they should use the 'prefetch' element.
Note that an SVG user agent may choose to incrementally render an image as it is loading but is not required to do so.
Attribute definitions:
The x-axis coordinate of one corner of the rectangular region.
The lacuna value is '0'.
Animatable: yes.
The y-axis coordinate of one corner of the rectangular region.
The lacuna value is '0'.
Animatable: yes.
The width of the rectangular region.
A negative value is unsupported. A value of zero disables rendering of the element. The lacuna value is '0'.
Animatable: yes.
The height of the rectangular region.
A negative value is unsupported. A value of zero disables rendering of the element. The lacuna value is '0'.
Animatable: yes.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
An IRI reference to the image. An invalid IRI reference is an unsupported value. An empty attribute value (xlink:href="") disables rendering of the element. The lacuna value is the empty string.
Animatable: yes.
A hint about the expected Internet Media Type of the raster image. Implementations may choose to not fetch images of formats that they do not support. Note that if an Internet Media type returned by the server, the server metadata is authoritative over the type attribute. See Metadata hints in specifications in the Authoritative Metadata TAG finding ([MIME-RESPECT], section 5). To ensure that a user agent only downloads media in formats that it supports, thus optimizing download time and bandwidth usage, authors are encouraged to use 'requiredFormats', instead of 'type'.
Animatable: yes.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
See definition.
An example:
SVG provides a 'switch' element and five conditional processing attributes — 'requiredExtensions', 'requiredFeatures', 'requiredFonts', 'requiredFormats' and 'systemLanguage' — which provide the ability to specify alternate content depending on the capabilities of a given SVG user agent or the user's language.
Conditional processing attributes do not affect the processing of all elements. They can be specified only on graphics elements, container elements, text content elements, descriptive elements, timed elements and the 'foreignObject' and 'discard' elements. A conditional processing attribute on any other element does not affect whether that element will be processed. When a conditional processing attribute is specified on a container element, it affects only the elements on which conditional processing attributes can be specified. For example, a 'requiredExtensions' attribute on a 'script' element will not control whether the script is executed. Note that if a conditional processing attribute is specified on a container element which contains scripts, it has no effect on whether the script is executed. In particular, all scripts contained in a 'switch' element are processed.
The conditional processing attributes act as boolean tests and evaluate to either true or false. If one is not specified, then it is assumed to evaluate to true. The attributes can be used in two ways, depending on the context of the element on which the attributes are specified. If the element's parent node is a 'switch' element, then at most one of the 'switch' element's children that conditional processing attributes apply to will be processed. (See the description of the 'switch' element for details.) Otherwise, if the element's parent node is not a 'switch' element, and conditional processing attributes do apply to the element, then the attributes determine whether that element will be processed.
What it means for an element not to be processed because of conditional processing attributes specified on it, or because it is a child of a 'switch' that has selected a different child for processing, depends on the type of element:
If the element is a graphics element, container element, text content element or a 'foreignObject' element, then the element is not rendered and is not a part of the rendering tree.
If the element is a timed element, then the element will never begin, regardless of its timing attributes and any invocations of methods on the SVGTimedElement and ElementTimeControl interfaces. If the element serves as a syncbase for any other timed elements in the document, then those syncbase references will never resolve to a concrete time. Thus, for example, if the element is an animation element, the animation will never have an effect, and if the element is an 'audio' element, then it will never generate any sound.
If the element is a 'discard' element, then it will never trigger the removal of its target element, nor will it remove itself.
Similar to the 'display' property, conditional processing attributes only affect the direct rendering and processing of applicable elements and do not prevent elements from being successfully referenced by other elements (such as via a 'use'). Conditional processing attributes in a shadow tree are processed normally.
Example systemLanguage below displays one of three text strings (in Welsh, Greek, or Spanish) if one of those is the user's preferred language. Otherwise, in this example, it displays nothing.
The 'switch' element is a container element that can be used to select one of its child elements to process based on their conditional processing attributes. The first direct child element of a 'switch' whose conditional processing attributes all evaluate to true will be processed as normal. All other direct child elements of the 'switch' that support conditional processing attributes will not be processed. The elements that support conditional processing attributes are listed in the Conditional processing overview section, above.
While conditional processing attributes are supported only on certain elements, those attributes on all direct child elements of a 'switch' are used to determine which children to disable processing for.
The values of the 'display' and 'visibility' properties have no effect on 'switch' element processing. In particular, setting 'display' to none on a child of a 'switch' element has no effect on the testing associated with 'switch' element processing.
Note that regardless of whether they are processed or disabled, child elements of the 'switch' element are still part of the DOM, and rules applying to the uniqueness of the 'id' and 'xml:id' attributes still apply. Additionally, elements which would not otherwise be rendered due to conditional processing can still be referenced, for example as the target of a 'use' element or as a paint server reference in a 'fill' property.
The element definition schema and content model for 'switch' are not defined here. It is defined in all the places it can occur.
For more information and an example, see Embedding foreign object types.
Attribute definitions:
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: no.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: no.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: no.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: no.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: no.
See attribute definition for description.
Animatable: yes.
See definition.
Definition of 'requiredFeatures':
A conditional processing attribute that controls conditional processing based on whether the specified features are supported by the SVG user agent. The value is a list of feature strings, with the individual values separated by white space. Only feature strings defined in an existing version of the SVG specification at the time the document is authored (such as those listed in this document's Feature String appendix) should be used, while third party extension features that are not part of an SVG standard should be indicated using the 'requiredExtensions' attribute instead.
This attribute evaluates to true for the purpose of conditional processing if and only if all of the specified features are supported. As with all conditional processing attributes, if 'requiredFeatures' is not specified, then it implicitly evaluates to true. However, if the attribute is specified, but has an empty string value, it evaluates to false. See Conditional processing overview for details on how conditional processing attributes influence document processing.
Animatable: no.
The 'requiredExtensions' attribute specifies a list of required language extensions. Language extensions are capabilities within an SVG user agent that go beyond the feature set defined in this specification. Each extension is identified by an IRI reference.
Language extensions may be vendor-specific or experimental features for the SVG language itself, or may be separate languages (e.g., XHTML, MathML). If an extension is a separate language that supports the Namespaces in XML 1.0 specification [XML-NS10] or the Namespaces in XML 1.1 specification [XML-NS], the IRI reference should be the Namespace URI for that language (e.g., "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", "http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"). If the language does not support either Namespaces in XML specification, the IRI reference should be an otherwise unique identifier for that language.
Definition of 'requiredExtensions':
A conditional processing attribute that controls conditional processing based on whether the specified extensions are supported by the SVG user agent. The value is a list of IRI references which identify the required extensions, with the individual values separated by white space.
This attribute evaluates to true for the purpose of conditional processing if and only if all of the specified extensions are supported. As with all conditional processing attributes, if 'requiredExtensions' is not specified, then it implicitly evaluates to true. However, if the attribute is specified, but has an empty string value, it evaluates to false. See Conditional processing overview for details on how conditional processing attribute influence document processing.
Animatable: no.
Since white space is used to separate values in the attribute, any white space characters in the IRI reference must be escaped.
Definition of 'systemLanguage':
A conditional processing attribute that controls conditional processing based on the system language. The value is a comma-separated list of language tags as defined in BCP 47 ([BCP 47], section 2).
This attribute evaluates to true for the purpose of conditional processing if one of the languages indicated by user preferences equals one of the languages given in the value of this attribute, or if one of the languages indicated by user preferences exactly equals a prefix of one of the languages given in the value of this attribute such that the first tag character following the prefix is U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS ("-"). As with all conditional processing attributes, if 'systemLanguage' is not specified, then it implicitly evaluates to true. However, if the attribute is specified, but has an empty string value, it evaluates to false. See Conditional processing overview for details on how conditional processing attribute influence document processing.
Animatable: no.
Note that the use of a prefix matching rule to determine whether the attribute evaluates to true or false does not imply that language tags are assigned to languages in such a way that it is always true that if a user understands a language with a certain tag, then this user will also understand all languages with tags for which this tag is a prefix. The prefix rule simply allows the use of prefix tags if this is the case.
Implementation note: When making the choice of linguistic preference available to the user, implementers should take into account the fact that users are not familiar with the details of language matching as described above, and should provide appropriate guidance. As an example, users may assume that on selecting "en-GB", they will be served any kind of English document if British English is not available. The user interface for setting user preferences should guide the user to add "en" to get the best matching behavior.
Multiple languages may be listed for content that is intended for multiple audiences. For example, content that is presented simultaneously in the original Maori and English versions, would call for:
<text systemLanguage="mi, en"><!-- content
goes here --></text>
However, just because multiple languages are present within the element on which the 'systemLanguage' conditional processing attribute is placed, this does not mean that it is intended for multiple linguistic audiences. An example would be a beginner's language primer, such as "A First Lesson in Latin," which is clearly intended to be used by an English-literate audience. In this case, the 'systemLanguage' conditional processing attribute should only include "en".
Authoring note: Authors should realize that if several alternative language objects are enclosed in a 'switch', and none of them matches, this may lead to situations where no content is displayed. It is thus recommended to include a "catch-all" choice at the end of such a 'switch' which is acceptable in all cases.
Many resources, especially media such as audio and video, have a wide range of formats. As it is often not possible to require support for a particular format, due to legal or platform restrictions, it is often necessary for content to provide alternatives so that SVG user agents can choose the format they support. The 'requiredFormats' attribute can be used to control conditional processing based on whether a particular format is supported by the user agent.
Definition of 'requiredFormats':
A conditional processing attribute that controls conditional processing based on whether the specified formats are supported by the SVG user agent. The value is a list of Internet media types, with the individual values separated by white space. For a list of registered Internet media types (formerly called MIME types), see the IANA Media Type registry [MIMETYPES]. For a list of Internet media types types for audio and video codecs, see the IANA codec registry and WAVE and AVI Codec Registries [CODECS, RFC2361].
As with all conditional processing attributes, if 'requiredFormats' is not specified, then it implicitly evaluates to true. However, if the attribute is specified, but has an empty string value, it evaluates to false. See Conditional processing overview for details on how conditional processing attribute influence document processing.
Animatable: no.
The following formats must always evaluate to true in conforming SVG viewers:
If the author wishes to have complete control over the appearance and location of text in the document then they must ensure that the correct font is used when rendering the text. This can be achieved by using SVG fonts and embedding the font in the document. However, this is not practical in all cases, especially when the number of glyphs used is very large or if the licensing of the font forbids such embedding.
Definition of 'requiredFonts':
A conditional processing attribute that controls conditional processing based on whether the specified fonts are available. The value is a list of font family names, using the same syntax as the 'font-family' property, for example when processing quoted strings, multiple, leading and trailing spaces, and case sensitivity. Generic family names may not be used, however.
This attribute evaluates to true for the purpose of conditional processing if and only if all of the specified fonts are available, either installed on the system or as an SVG font defined or embedded within the document. As with all conditional processing attributes, if 'requiredFonts' is not specified, then it implicitly evaluates to true. However, if the attribute is specified, but has an empty string value, it evaluates to false. See Conditional processing overview for details on how conditional processing attribute influence document processing.
Animatable: no.
Documents often reference and use the contents of other document and other web resources as part of their rendering or processing. In some cases, authors want to specify that particular resources are required for a document to be considered correct.
The 'externalResourcesRequired' attribute is available on all container elements except 'defs' and on all elements which potentially can reference external resources. It specifies whether referenced resources that are not part of the current document are required for proper rendering of the given element.
Attribute definition:
An attribute that specifies whether external resources are required for correct rendering of this element and its descendants.
load event is
not fired for the element, and the document becomes
in error
(see Error processing).
The document remains
in error
until all required resources become available.
Animatable: no.
Attribute 'externalResourcesRequired' is not inheritable (from a sense of attribute value inheritance), but if set on a container element, its value will apply to all elements within the container.
Because setting externalResourcesRequired="true" on a container element will have the effect of disabling progressive display of the contents of that container, if that container includes elements that reference external resources, tools that generate SVG content should normally not just set externalResourcesRequired="true" on the 'svg' element on a universal basis. Instead, it is better to specify externalResourcesRequired="true" on those particular elements which specifically need the availability of external resources in order to render properly.
When progressively downloading a document, an SVG user agent conceptually builds a tree of nodes in various states. The possible states for these nodes are unresolved, resolved and error.
This description uses two conceptual parsing events to simplify the prose in explaining the intended behaviour of progressive rendering. The events referred to in the following prose are the start element and end element events. The start element event is considered to be triggered when a start-tag or an empty-element tag is read. The end element event occurs either immediately following the start element event in the case of an empty-element tag, or when an end-tag is read. The terms start-tag, end-tag and empty-element tag are as defined in Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 ([XML10], section 3.1) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 ([XML11], section 3.1).
When loading a document following the start element event on a node, that node becomes part of the document tree in the unresolved state. It is appended as the last child of the most recently opened element that is still open (that is, the most recent element for which a start element event has occurred with no corresponding end element event). If the node's dependencies are successfully resolved, then the node enters the resolved state or if the node's dependencies are found to be in error, then the node enters the error state.
When an end element event occurs for a 'script' element, that element is processed according to the Script processing section of the Scripting chapter. Further parsing of the document will be blocked until processing of the 'script' is complete.
Node dependencies include both children content (like the child elements on a 'g') and resources (e.g. images referenced by an 'image') referenced from that node or from its children. Empty elements (elements without children) become resolved when the end element event occurs on the element; elements with child nodes become resolved when all their children are resolved and when the end element event occurs on the element. Resources become resolved (or found in error) by an SVG user agent specific mechanism.
SVG user agents must implement progressive rendering although there is no minimum rendering update frequency required for conformance. Implementations should find their own balance between processing the changes in the document tree and rendering the tree to produce a smooth rendering avoiding significant pauses. The following rules apply to progressive rendering:
The SVG user agent has the opportunity to update the rendering following each start element and/or end element event, i.e. each time the SVG user agent parses a start-tag, empty-element tag or end-tag.
The SVG user agent renders the conceptual document tree nodes in document order up to, and not including the first node in the unresolved state which has 'externalResourcesRequired' set to "true". Nodes in the resolved state are always rendered. Nodes in the unresolved state but with 'externalResourcesRequired' set to "false" are rendered in their current state. If the node has no rendering (e.g., an 'image' pending a resource), then nothing is rendered for that node.
If a node enters the error state then the document enters the error state and progressive rendering stops.
Note that even if the SVG user agent has the opportunity to update the rendering after each start/end element event there are situations where such an update shouldn't be done. For example, 'font' element children ('font-face', 'hkern', 'missing-glyph', 'glyph') should not cause an update of the document rendering, only the end element event on the 'font' element should cause a document rendering as for other node types.
Note that forward referencing from a 'discard' element should be avoided when using progressive rendering. If it fails to find (and thus discard) an element, it will not later discard the element when it has finally loaded.
In Example progRend01 below, the 'g' element rendering may start when the 'g' end-tag has been parsed and processed and when all the resources needed by its children have been resolved. This means that the group's rendering may start when the group has been fully parsed and myImage.png has been successfully retrieved.
Example progRend02 demonstrates how progressive rendering is performed when there is a 'use' element with a forward reference.
The following list shows the possible renderings of the document as it is parsed (the rendering state follows the colon):
Example progRend03 demonstrates how progressive rendering is performed when there is a 'use' element with a forward reference and which has externalResourcesRequired="true".
The possible rendering states are as follows:
Example progRend04 shows a 'use' element with a reference to an element that is in a container with externalResourcesRequired="true".
The possible rendering states as the document is parsed are as follows:
Example progRend05 shows an example of progressive rendering with a forward reference to an SVG font. Rendering updates do not occur mid-way through parsing a 'font' element.
Rendering update possibilities as the document is parsed are as follows:
SVG 1.1 did not specify when an SVG user agent should begin downloading referenced media. This lead to implementation differences particularly when the media was not used in the initial document state (e.g. it was offscreen or hidden). SVG Tiny 1.2 does not require SVG user agents to download referenced media that is not visible at the time the document is loaded, unless those media are contained inside a subtree for which 'externalResourcesRequired' is set to "true". This means there may be a pause to download the file the first time a piece of media is displayed. More advanced SVG user agents may wish to predict that particular media streams will be needed and therefore download them in anticipation.
SVG Tiny 1.2 therefore adds functionality to allow content developers to suggest prefetching content from the server before it is needed to improve the rendering performance of the document. The SMIL 2.1 'prefetch' element ([SMIL21], section 4.4) has been incorporated into SVG as the 'prefetch' element, with the following modifications:
Attributes cannot be given <percent-value> values.
The 'xlink:href' attribute is permitted to point into the document in which the 'prefetch' element appears so that this feature can be used as a hint indicating how much of the document is required before playback can start.
In order to adequately support non-local IRI references, the 'mediaCharacterEncoding' and 'mediaContentEncodings' attributes have been added.
The 'prefetch' element provides a hint to the SVG user agent that media will be used in the future and the author would like part or all of it fetched ahead of time to make document playback smoother. As it is a hint, user agents may ignore 'prefetch' elements, although doing so may cause an interruption in the document playback when the resource is needed. It gives authoring tools and authors the ability to schedule retrieval of resources when they think that there is available bandwidth or time to do it.
When instead of referring to external media, 'prefetch' refers to the same document it occurs in, then it can only reference a top level 'g' element. A top level 'g' element is a 'g' element that is a direct child of the rootmost 'svg' element.
To enable smooth playback during progressive downloading in this scenario, it is recommended that each adjacent top level 'g' element contains adjacent chronological scenes in the animation. In this case the 'prefetch' element must appear in a 'defs' block before all defined 'g' elements in the document. In such cases, 'prefetch' is used to tell the SVG user agent how much it needs to buffer in order to be able to play content back in a smooth and predictable manner.
Attribute definitions:
Defines how much of the media to fetch in bytes in terms of the file size of the media.
When 'prefetch' refers to a resource in the same document (i.e. a top level 'g' element), the 'mediaSize' attribute indicates the size in bytes of the 'g' element and its children. That size corresponds to the encodings used when transmitting the document. If the document is encoded in UTF-8 [RFC3629] and gzipped [RFC1952], then the size of the gzipped UTF-8 fragment applies. If that same document were decompressed and transcoded to UTF-16 [RFC2781] the hints will become stale. Since streaming hints are to be used primarily in streaming scenarios, it is not expected that hint staleness will occur frequently.
Animatable: no.
Defines how much of the media to fetch in terms of the duration of the media. For discrete media (non-time based media such as PNG) using this attribute causes the entire resource to be prefetched.
When 'prefetch' refers to a resource in the same document (i.e. a top level 'g' element), this is the active duration of the referenced element. In cases where the exact active duration can not be calculated beforehand (e.g. if the end of an animation depends on user interaction), it is suggested that the content author estimate the minimum active duration for the referenced element. This estimate, even if zero, will allow the SVG user agent to calculate how much of the overall document to download before beginning playback in a streaming scenario.
Animatable: no.
Defines how much network bandwidth, in bits per second, the SVG user agent should use when performing the prefetch. If the attribute is not specified, all available bandwidth should be used.
Animatable: no.
Indicates the XML character set encoding (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc.) that the 'mediaSize' attribute applies to. Tools that produce SVG should include this attribute if they specify the 'mediaSize' attribute. The main use of this attribute is to know what character encoding was used when measuring 'mediaSize' so that staleness of the hints may be easily detected. If the attribute is not specified, the encoding that was used to calculate the size is that which is returned by the server.
Animatable: no.
The 'mediaContentEncodings' attribute is a white space separated list of the content encodings as defined in section 3.5 of HTTP/1.1 [RFC2616] (gzip, compress, etc.) that the 'mediaSize' attribute applies to. The order of the list is the order in which the content encodings were applied to encode the data. Note that while situations in which multiple content codings are applied are currently rare, they are allowed by HTTP/1.1 and thus that functionality is supported by SVG. Tools that produce SVG must include this attribute if they specify the 'mediaSize' attribute and the Content-Encoding is other than the identity encoding. The main use of this attribute is to know what parameters were used when measuring 'mediaSize' so that staleness of the hints may be easily detected. If the 'mediaContentEncodings' attribute is not specified it is as if the identity encoding value from HTTP/1.1 had been specified. This indicates that no transformation (i.e. encodings) at all has been used.
Animatable: no.
An IRI reference to the resource to prefetch. An invalid IRI reference is an unsupported value. An empty attribute value (xlink:href="") means that no prefetching will occur. The lacuna value is the empty string.
Animatable: no.
When 'prefetch' refers to external media, if both 'mediaSize' and 'mediaTime' are specified, then 'mediaSize' shall be used and 'mediaTime' is ignored. If neither 'mediaSize' nor 'mediaTime' is specified, the behavior is that the entire resource should be fetched.
When 'prefetch' refers to a resource in the same document (i.e. a top level 'g' element), both the 'mediaSize' and 'mediaTime' attributes can be used together by a more advanced SVG user agent to determine how much it needs to buffer in order to be able to play content back in a smooth manner.
Note that whereas the 'externalResourcesRequired' attribute is used to designate that a resource is required, the 'prefetch' element is used to optimize the retrieval of a resource. Setting the 'externalResourcesRequired' attribute does not influence the behavior of the 'prefetch' element and vice-versa. This is true whether the 'prefetch' element points to an internal 'g' element or external resource.
Example prefetch01 demonstrates the use of the 'prefetch' element when it refers to external media:
Example prefetch02 is an example of the 'prefetch' element referring to a resource in the same document (i.e. a top level 'g' element):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<svg width="400" height="300" version="1.2"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" baseProfile="tiny"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
timelineBegin="onStart"
playbackOrder="forwardOnly">
<desc>
Example of using SVGT 1.2 features for smooth playback
during progressive downloading.
</desc>
<defs>
<prefetch xlink:href="#scene1"
mediaCharacterEncoding="UTF-16"
mediaTime="5s" mediaSize="94230" />
<prefetch xlink:href="#scene2"
mediaCharacterEncoding="UTF-16"
mediaTime="10s" mediaSize="283474" />
<prefetch xlink:href="#scene3"
mediaCharacterEncoding="UTF-16"
mediaTime="15s" mediaSize="627638" />
</defs>
<g xml:id="scene1">
<discard begin="6s"/>
<!-- graphics for scene 1 go here -->
</g>
<g xml:id="scene2">
<discard begin="16s"/>
<!-- graphics for scene 2 go here -->
</g>
<g xml:id="scene3">
<discard begin="21s"/>
<!-- graphics for scene 3 go here -->
</g>
</svg>The 'id', 'xml:id', 'xml:base', 'class', 'role', 'rel', 'rev', 'about', 'content', 'datatype', 'property', 'resource', and 'typeof' attributes are available on all elements defined by SVG Tiny 1.2. Some of these elements, such as 'id', 'xml:id', and 'xml:base' may have a direct effect on the structure and rendering of SVG, while others may only affect SVG indirectly, or may be used only for auxiliary processing of SVG content. See extensible metadata attributes for more details.
Attribute definitions:
This attribute specifies a unique identifier for the element. Because of wider use and compatibility with legacy content and existing user agents (including authoring tools), it is recommended that content intended for use in a Web browser environment use 'id' instead of 'xml:id'. (See details on ID attributes below.)
Animatable: no.
This attribute specifies a unique identifier for the element. Refer to xml:id Version 1.0 [XMLID]. It is recommended that content intended for use with generic XML processing tools, particularly in a scenario where the datatype of the 'id' attribute is not known, use 'xml:id'. (See details on ID attributes below.)
Animatable: no.
This attribute specifies a base IRI other than the base IRI of the document or external entity. Refer to XML Base [XML-BASE].
Animatable: no.
The 'class' attribute assigns one or more class names to an element. The element may be said to belong to these classes. A class name may be shared by several element instances. The class attribute has several roles:
The attribute value indicates membership in one or more sets. Any number of elements may be assigned to the same set. Multiple set names must be separated by white space characters.
Animatable: yes.
The 'role' attribute assigns one or more role values to an element. The element may be said to have these roles. A role value may be shared by several element instances. Unlike the 'class' attribute, 'role' attribute values are intended to be selected from a predefined set of values with specific semantic aspects that are assigned to the element, such as those defined in the ARIA ontology [ARIA], XHTML Role Attribute Module [ROLE], XHTML Vocabulary collection [XHTMLVOCAB], and in future SVG specifications.
The 'role' attribute is intended to functionally align with the XHTML Role Attribute Module [ROLE].
The attribute value indicates membership in one or more sets. Any number of elements may be assigned to the same set. Multiple set names must be separated by white space characters.
Animatable: yes.
The 'rel' attribute assigns one or more relationship values to an element. The value of the 'rel' attribute expresses the relationships between two resources. For 'a' elements in particular, the 'rel' attribute indicates the relationship that the linked resource holds for the element's children or the element's containing document.
This attribute is an analog of the HTML [HTML4] attribute of the same name. It is intended to be used in the same manner, such as with RDFa [RDFA], Microformats [MF], and other semantic purposes.
The attribute value indicates membership in one or more sets. Any number of elements may be assigned to the same set. Multiple set names must be separated by white space characters.
Animatable: yes.
The 'rev' attribute assigns one or more relationship values to an element. The value of the 'rev' attribute expresses the reverse relationships between two resources. For 'a' elements in particular, the 'rev' attribute indicates the relationship that the element's children or the element's containing document holds for the linked resource.
This attribute is an analog of the HTML [HTML4] attribute of the same name. It is intended to be used in the same manner, such as with RDFa [RDFA], Microformats [MF], and other semantic purposes.
The attribute value indicates membership in one or more sets. Any number of elements may be assigned to the same set. Multiple set names must be separated by white space characters.
Animatable: yes.
The 'about' attribute assigns one or more relationship values to an element. The value of the 'about' attribute is intended to be used for stating the subject of the element's data.
This attribute is intended to functionally align with the attribute of the same name in the RDFa [RDFA] specification, but is not limited to use with that format.
The attribute value indicates membership in one or more sets. Any number of elements may be assigned to the same set. Multiple set names must be separated by white space characters.
Animatable: yes.
The 'content' attribute provides a plain text value that may be suitable for humans, or may be machine-readable, or both, depending on the context. In general, this should only be used to supplement textual child content, or to be used on elements which do not normally take text as child content.
This attribute is intended to functionally align with the attribute of the same name in the RDFa [RDFA] specification, but is not limited to use with that format.
Animatable: yes.
The 'datatype' attribute specifies a semantic datatype for the content of the element, or the value of the 'content' attribute if one is provided for the element.
This attribute should not be confused with the 'type' attribute, and has no direct effect on the rendering or execution of the element.
This attribute is intended to functionally align with the attribute of the same name in the RDFa [RDFA] specification, but is not limited to use with that format.
Animatable: yes.
The 'property' attribute is used for expressing relationships between the element's subject (e.g., the text content of a child node or of an attribute value) and a set of known or referenced properties.
This attribute is intended to functionally align with the attribute of the same name in the RDFa [RDFA] specification, but is not limited to use with that format.
The attribute value indicates membership in one or more sets. Any number of elements may be assigned to the same set. Multiple set names must be separated by white space characters.
Animatable: yes.
The 'resource' attribute associates a resource, typically expressed with an IRI reference, to the element, in a manner that does not normally resolve the IRI reference.
This attribute is intended to functionally align with the attribute of the same name in the RDFa [RDFA] specification, but is not limited to use with that format.
Animatable: yes.
The 'typeof' attribute associates one or more datatypes with the element. This attribute should not be confused with the 'type' attribute, and has no direct effect on the rendering or execution of the element.
This attribute is intended to functionally align with the attribute of the same name in the RDFa [RDFA] specification, but is not limited to use with that format.
The attribute value indicates membership in one or more sets. Any number of elements may be assigned to the same set. Multiple set names must be separated by white space characters.
Animatable: yes.
Both the 'id' and 'xml:id' attributes specify a unique identifier for the element. Both are have the data type <NCName>, but are of type <ID> for purposes of validation. 'xml:id' is intended to represent type <ID> universally across all document types. This makes it more suitable for certain compound documents with arbitrary XML, or with generic XML toolchains which require explicit knowledge of <ID>-typed attributes.
It is strongly recommended that SVG generators only use 'id' to assign identity to elements, to maintain backwards compatibility with existing viewers, authoring tools, and other content.
There remains only one single
id
field on the
SVGElement
interface, which can be used to change the value of either attribute
(e.g. by using the
setAttributeNS(),
setTraitNS(),
or setTrait() methods).
Likewise, the
getElementById
method on the
Document
interface applies equally to both the
'id' and
'xml:id' attributes.
Because they are intended for different environments, the 'id' and 'xml:id' attributes must not be used together on SVG elements in the same document. Such documents are not conforming SVG 1.2 Tiny content, and the behavior is not specified.
In order to facilitate the creation of content that can be used in both primary scenarios (that is, in existing desktop browsers and authoring tools, and in XML toolchains), an XSLT stylesheet can be used to convert the 'id' attributes to 'xml:id' attributes (and vice versa). For example, when content that has been authored with the browser environment in mind is being prepared for consumption by a generic XML tool, it can be preprocessed by using the id2xmlid.xsl sample stylesheet. This allows the same content to be used with little overhead or risk of breaking content. Example transformation stylesheets are provided below:
Elements that might contain character data content have attributes 'xml:lang' and 'xml:space' to specify the natural language and whitespace processing of the content.
Attribute definitions:
This is a standard XML attribute used to specify the language (e.g., English) used in the child text content and attribute values of the element it occurs on. The value is either a language tag as defined in IETF BCP 47 [BCP 47] or the empty string, "". Refer to Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 ([XML10], section 2.12) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 ([XML11], section 2.12) for the definition of this attribute.
Animatable: no.
This is a standard XML attribute used to specify whether white space is preserved in character data. The only possible values are "default" and "preserve". Refer to Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 ([XML10], section 2.10) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 ([XML11], section 2.10) for the definition of this attribute. See also the discussion of white space handling for text content elements in SVG.
Animatable: no.