Introduction

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a mature World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard designed for user interactive graphics on the Web and Mobile platform. Similar to HTML, SVG can coexist happily with other technologies like CSS and JavaScript in modern browsers forming the backbone of many web applications. In today's Web, you can see use cases of SVG everywhere from digital map to data visualization. So far in this book we have covered most of the recipes using HTML elements alone, however, in real-world projects, SVG is the de facto standard for data visualization; it is also where D3's strength really shines. In this chapter, we will cover the basic concept of SVG as well as D3's support for SVG shape generation. SVG is a very rich topic. Volumes of books can be and have been devoted to this topic alone, hence, we are not planning or even going to try to cover all SVG-related topics, rather we'll focus on D3 and data visualization related techniques and features.

What is...