Vector Markup Language
| Filename extension |
.htm or .html
|
|---|---|
| Internet media type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.vmlDrawing |
| Developed by | Microsoft |
| Type of format | Vector image format |
| Extended from | XML |
| Standard | Part of ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500:2008 |
| Website | ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500-4:2012 |
Vector Markup Language (VML) was an XML-based file format for two-dimensional vector graphics.
VML was specified in Part 4 of the Office Open XML standards ISO/IEC 29500 and ECMA-376. According to the specification, VML is a deprecated format included in Office Open XML for legacy reasons only.
VML was pervasively used in MS Office 2007 documents (i.e. Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents).
As of 2012, with the release of Internet Explorer 10, VML became obsolete and is no longer supported by Internet Explorer standard mode. It is a legacy feature that is available in Internet Explorer 10 only when the browser is set to run in modes that emulate the functionality of previous versions of Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and 9.
VML was submitted to the W3C in 1998 by Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Macromedia, Microsoft, and Vision. Around the same time other competing W3C submissions were received in the area of web vector graphics, such as PGML from Adobe Systems, Sun Microsystems, and others. As a result of these submissions, a new W3C working group was created, which produced Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG became a W3C Recommendation in 2001 as a language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML. VML has been largely deprecated in favor of other formats, such as SVG. SVG is not compatible with VML.
Development of the format ceased in 1998. VML is implemented in Internet Explorer from version 5 to version 9 and in Microsoft Office 2000. VML is no longer available in Internet Explorer 10. Microsoft expects web sites to transition to SVG. Version 2 of the Google Maps JavaScript API used to use VML for vector paths on Internet Explorer 5.5+, but has been officially deprecated in favour of version 3, which does not.
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