Since before the iPhone was released, there was speculation that it would support SVG.  After all, WebKit supports SVG, and Safari is based on WebKit, and the iPhone uses Safari.  But alas, the build of Safari that went on the iPhone did not include SVG support… nor, more famously, did the iPhone support Flash or Silverlight. Rats!

Realistically, it doesn’t make a huge impact in the total deployment of SVG on mobile devices.  For all that they are cool, iPhones make up a pretty small margin of mobile devices.  Opera is probably deployed on more devices, and it’s supported SVG for a while.  SVG is used on the BlackBerry, as I understand.  The BitFlash and Ikivo SVG players are deployed on something like half a billion phones, both for content viewing and as the GUI of the device itself.  But… still, having it on the iPhone would be a bit of a coup, and would enable lots of neato Webapps.

And as of yesterday, when I updated the firmware on my iPod Touch, SVG is now supported natively!

It even support scripting! Mouse over the lil buttons below the SVG logo…

But not yet SMIL (declarative animation) it seems…

WebKit itself does support SMIL, so I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before it works on the iPhamily as well.

Thanks to Luis Vielva for bringing this to the SVG community’s attention.

W00t!

Update: Some folks have asked me what version I’m running: it’s v2.1, which is apparently not available for the iPhone itself until tomorrow.