It was
relatively simple in its capabilities, but suf?¬?cient for the needs of modeling languages,
supported 24-bit colors, and could be read in the Macintosh, Windows, and Unix
worlds.
The advent of XML saw the introduction in 1998 of two competing XML vector
graphics formats, Microsoft??™s Vector Markup Language (VML) and Adobe??™s
Precision Graphics Markup Language (PGML). For a while it looked like the situation
would develop into a typical format war, where users are losers. Fortunately both
sides, and their supporters, agreed to come together to work on Scalable Vector
Graphics (SVG) (howrefreshing to have anXMLlanguage that does not end in ML!).
While Microsoft are still dragging their feet a little in browser support, Internet
Explorer can view it with the Adobe plug-in, and Mozilla Firefox and Opera both
support SVG natively.
An important part of viewing model images on a computer is the ability for the
elements in the models to work as hyperlinks. This allows the user to click on an object
in the image, and jump to the part of the documentation specifying that object. In
HTML, this can be accomplished by generating an image map; in SVG, the elements
themselves can have
tags. It should even be possible in RTF: invisible
GENERATOR OUTPUT PATTERNS 281
drawing objects could be overlaid on a bitmap picture and given hyperlinks with
\hlloc.
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