groupingposition;svg
I'm having a play with SVG and am having a few problems with positioning. I have a series of shapes which are contained in the g group tag. I was hoping to use it like a container, so I could set its x position and then all the elements in that group would also move. But that doesn't seem to be possible.
I can recommend the SVG Primer (published by the W3C), which covers this topic: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/resources/svgprimer.html#SVG_in_HTML
If you use <object> then you get raster fallback for free*:
<object data="your.svg" type="image/svg+xml">
<img src="yourfallback.jpg" />
</object>
*) Well, not quite for free, because some browsers download both resources, see Larry's suggestion below for how to get around that.
2014 update:
If you want a non-interactive svg, use <img> with script fallbacks
to png version (for older IE and android < 3). One clean and simple
way to do that:
<img src="your.svg" onerror="this.src='your.png'">.
This will behave much like a GIF image, and if your browser supports declarative animations (SMIL) then those will play.
If you want an interactive svg, use either <iframe> or <object>.
If you need to provide older browsers the ability to use an svg plugin, then use <embed>.
For svg in css background-image and similar properties, modernizr is one choice for switching to fallback images, another is depending on multiple backgrounds to do it automatically:
div {
background-image: url(fallback.png);
background-image: url(your.svg), none;
}
Note: the multiple backgrounds strategy doesn't work on Android 2.3 because it supports multiple backgrounds but not svg.
An additional good read is this blogpost on svg fallbacks.
Best Answer
Everything in the g element is positioned relative to the current transform matrix.
To move the content, just put the transformation in the g element:
Links: Example from the SVG 1.1 spec