If you think of SVG as a toy technology to draw nice pictures, wake up! SVG is invading your cell phone and this "graphical XML" might wipe out "text XML" (such as XHTML and XSL-FO), just as graphical user interfaces have wiped out text-based user interfaces.

SVG has been one of the most-talked-about technologies during XML Europe 2002, with four presentations and a countless number of references in other presentations and during the experts panel.

Some key facts which have drawn my attention are:

• From the presentation by Dean Jackson, the number of mobile phone manufacturers and software editors supporting the SVG 1.1 "basic" and "tiny" subset showing that SVG will soon invade our cell phones and PDAs, and the fact that SVG 1.2 will include text-wrapping functions making it more suitable for applications with many text objects than it is currently.
• From the presentation by Benjamin Jung, the comparison between a raster image and a "badly designed HTML page where content, transformation and presentation are badly mixed" and the ability given by SVG to separate these three components.
• From the first presentation by Antoine Quint that Flash is similar in this aspect to raster images and that SVG + SMIL enables you to cleanly separate content and presentation from the animation.
• From the problems that Antoine Quint had matching the resolution of his laptop with the video projector, the benefit of using SVG (which scales so perfectly) as a rendering format for presentation.
• From the second presentation by Antoine Quint that the SVG DOM appears to achieve a much better degree of compatibility than (X)HTML DOMs have ever achieved, that the SVG extensions give you access (in addition to all the XML objects) to SVG and CSS objects, and that you could implement XForms and even a full graphical user interface using SVG and its DOM.
• From an answer by Leigh Dodds during the experts panel that SVG could be used -and was being used- to render pages for printing in lieu of XSL-FO.

Putting all this together, one may wonder if SVG is not the first real application of XML as "SGML on the Web".

Other stories:

• Revisiting SGML on the web
• SVG 1.1, SVG Mobile Profiles reach Candidate Recommendation
• SVG and SMIL Animation go gold