IMPORTANT NOTE: Since this post was published SMIL animations have been deprecated and the animated demo will no longer work. I decided to leave it up though as the text along a path bit is still relevant.

The <text> element defines a graphic consisting of text. Writing and editing <text> in SVG provides a very powerful ability to create scalable text as graphics that can be easily changed and edited within the SVG code.

Using SVG inline provides total access to the graphic for complete customization and control over its output. This is especially handy when creating shapes by hand in the browser, or making edits to an existing graphic.

I recently wrote a post on understanding SVG viewport and viewBox and figured this would be the perfect follow-up topic to quickly dig a little deeper.

In using the <svg> element we are establishing a fragment consisting of nested details in our document. This fragment has its own viewport and coordinate system which can seem very complex and intimidating when first getting started.

I have been working with SVG gradients a lot lately. I wrote about getting started with SVG gradients over at SitePoint, and also an intro on animating SVG gradients over at Designmodo. While they are super neat and pretty straight forward, I ran into a couple cross browser issues that I wanted to discuss further in this post.