SVG and Viewers
Because SVG has little current native browser support, to view SVG files, you must download an SVG viewer. There are numerous SVG viewers out, but by far the most popular is the Adobe SVG viewer. The viewer is free and can be downloaded by going to www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html. The Adobe viewer works with IE 4 and above and with Netscape 4.5 through 4.77.
NOTE
Browser Issues: Netscape and Opera
At the time of this writing, Netscape 6, 6.01, and Opera 5 were not officially supported in the Adobe SVG viewer. For information and updates on how to use Adobe's SVG viewer with the above browsers, please check out www.adobe.com/svg/.
In addition to the Adobe SVG viewer, the Batik project offers an open-source code viewer, as well as an SVG toolkit, at http://xml.apache.org/batik/. IBM also has an SVG viewer available at www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/svgview.
An exciting facet of SVG is that it can be rendered as easily on pocket devices as on desktop PCs. The CSIRO Pocket Viewer has an evaluation version of its SVG viewer for pocket PCs on its site. Just go to www.cmis.csiro.au/sis/SVGpocket.htm for an overview and information.
Once you have downloaded the SVG viewer of your choice (Adobe is recommended for this book), you'll want to see some real-life SVG to get an idea of its capabilities.
Point your browser to (www.phptr.com/advancedweb/svg) to view an SVG file. If your Adobe SVG viewer is downloaded properly, you should see the image in Figure 14.
FIGURE 14 The image and code are named jasc.html and are located at www.phptr.com/advancedweb/svg. This file was created in Jasc WebDraw, which is an SVG editor and drawing package. We'll tell you all about Jasc in Chapter 10. The SVG content was then embedded into an HTML page.