Vector Markup Language

Vector Markup Language (VML) is an obsolete XML-based file format for two-dimensional vector graphics. It 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 used extensively in MS Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. In 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. History VML was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (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 Precision Graphics Markup Language (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.