Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections

SVG Tiny 1.2, released in December 2008, is a profile of SVG_1_1 (at the time, often referred to as SVG 1.1 Full) intended for implementation on a range of devices, including cellphones and PDAs. SVG Tiny 1.2 includes a subset of the features included in SVG 1.1, along with new features to extend the capabilities of SVG.

According to Adobe Illustrator Help -- Saving artwork: Save in SVG format, SVG Tiny does not support gradients, transparency, clipping, masks, symbols, patterns, underline text, strike through text, vertical text, or SVG filter effects.

SVG Tiny 1.2 may include animation via internal markup closely related to the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 2.1 Specification. The supported animation features incorporated and extended the general-purpose XML animation capabilities described in SMIL 2.1. See 16.2.2 Relationship to SMIL 2.1 Animation.

Examples of features introduced in SVG Tiny 1.2 are listed below, annotated as to whether or how the functionality was expected to be integrated into future versions of SVG based on SVG2 Requirements Input: Features from SVG Tiny 1.2.

• Elements designed to refer to external resources: audio, video, and animation. [Note: SVG 2 was expected to retain audio and video elements and to add the features of the SVG Tiny 1.2 animation element but not the element itself.]
• A vector-effect property. Although SVG graphics, are designed for zooming, there are situations when it is useful for the outline of an object to retain its original width, for example for roads on a map. A single vector effect (non-scaling-stroke) was defined to support this functionality. [Note: The property will be incorporated into SVG 2, possibly with additional effects defined.]
• A solidcolor element. Convenient for repeated use of the same colors. [Note: This feature will be incorporated into SVG 2]
• A textArea element. Allowed wrapping of text content within a given rectangular region. [Note: A more general text-wrapping replacement, compatible with CSS, will be incorporated into SVG 2.]

SVG Tiny 1.2 can be validated using a normative RelaxNG schema. This is in contrast to SVG 1.1, for which an XML DTD was provided.

See SVG_family for more detail on the structure of SVG files.

SVG Tiny 1.1, not described separately on this Web site. SVG Tiny 1.2 is a backwards compatible upgrade to SVG Tiny 1.1.

See SVG_family for information on adoption of SVG in general.

In 2013, Ben Frain reported, "Furthermore, whilst ‘Tiny 1.2′ is widely supported on mobile devices (including iOS) good ol’ Microsoft don’t support it. Even IE10 on Surface does NOT support SVG Tiny 1.2 profile."

According to the Editor's Draft of the SVG 2 specification as of March 2020, the SVG Working Group considers version Tiny 1.2 to be a deprecated branch of the SVG standard.

Good support. See SVG_family

See SVG_family.

Sample SVG Tiny 1.2 file. Notice version and baseProfile attributes.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.2" baseProfile="tiny" viewBox="0 0 30 30">
<desc>Example SVG file</desc>
<rect x="10" y="10" width="10" height="10" fill="red"/>
</svg>

See also SVG_family.

Motivation for publication of SVG Tiny 1.2:

From Introduction in specification: "Industry demand, overwhelming support in the SVG working group and requests from the SVG developer community established the need for some form of SVG suited to displaying vector graphics on small devices. Moreover, the mission statement of SVG 1.0 specifically addressed small devices as a target area for vector graphics display. In order to meet these demands the SVG Working Group created a profile specification that was suitable for use on mobile devices as well as on desktops. The Mobile SVG Profiles specification [SVGM11] (also known as SVG Mobile 1.1) addressed that requirement and defined two profiles to deal with the variety of mobile devices having different characteristics in terms of CPU speed, memory size, and color support. The SVG Mobile 1.1 specification defined SVG Tiny (SVGT) 1.1, suitable for highly restricted mobile devices; it also defined a second profile, SVG Basic (SVGB) 1.1, targeted for higher level mobile devices. The major difference between SVG Tiny 1.1 and SVG Basic 1.1 was the absence of scripting and styling in SVG 1.1 Tiny, and thus any requirement to maintain a Document Object Model (DOM). This saved a substantial amount of memory in most implementations.
Experience with SVG Tiny 1.1, which was widely adopted in the industry and shipped as standard on a variety of cellphones, indicated that the profile was a little too restrictive in some areas. Features from SVG 1.1 such as gradients and opacity were seen to have substantial value for creating attractive content, and were shown to be implementable on cellphones. There was also considerable interest in adding audio and video capabilities, building on the SMIL support in SVG Tiny 1.1.
Advances such as DOM Level 3, which introduces namespace support and value normalization, prompted a second look at the use of programming languages and scripting with SVG Tiny. In conjunction with the Java JSR 226 group [JSR226], a lightweight interface called the Micro DOM, or uDOM, was developed. This could be, but need not be, implemented on top of DOM Level 3. With this advance, lightweight programmatic control of SVG (for example, for games or user interfaces) and use with scripting languages, became feasible on the whole range of platforms from cellphones through to desktops. In consequence, there is only a single Mobile profile for SVG 1.2: SVG Tiny 1.2."

SVG Tiny 1.2 added features requested by SVG authors, implementers and users of SVG Tiny 1.1, not described separately on this website. SVG Tiny 1.2 is a backwards compatible upgrade to SVG Tiny 1.1. SVG Tiny 1.1 content was expected to render the same in conformant SVG Tiny 1.2 user agents as it did in conformant SVG Tiny 1.1 user agents.

Plans for future development: The specification for SVG Tiny 1.2 says, "this specification represents the core for a set of modular extensions, but is named SVG Tiny for historical reasons, as a profile for mobile devices. Future versions of this specification will maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions of the language, in a continuing line of technology, but will bear the name 'SVG Core' to represent this relationship." However, the plan to use the term 'SVG Core' was not implemented. According to the editor's draft for SVG 2.0 on February 16, 2020, "An intermediate version of SVG - named Tiny 1.2 - was released in 2008. However it did not receive wide acceptance and there have been very few implementations of its enhanced feature set. However there are some 1.2 features that have been implemented by many SVG implementations and those have been incorporated as part of this specification. But otherwise, the SVG Working Group consider version Tiny 1.2 to be a deprecated branch of the SVG standard."