The PostScript format was unable to create scalable fonts and objects without creating files which were inordinately larger than a file which used unscalable fonts and objects.

In April 1998, the W3C received a note[1] from representatives of four corporate entities – Adobe Systems, IBM, Netscape and Sun Microsystems – with regard to the Precision Graphics Markup Language (PGML), an XML-based markup language.

A second note[2] was submitted came a month later from a team which included representatives of Hewlett-Packard, Macromedia, Microsoft, and Visio; the note contained a draft specification for the Vector Markup Language (VML), another XML-based markup language.

Initial versions of the SVG specification have now been natively implemented by most modern browsers.

As of September 2014, the various modules of this new specification were expected to reach Candidate Recommendation status in 2015 or early 2016.