<switch>

The <switch> SVG element evaluates the requiredFeatures, requiredExtensions and systemLanguage attributes on its direct child elements in order, and then processes and renders the first child for which these attributes evaluate to true. All others will be bypassed and therefore not rendered. If the child element is a container element such as a <g>, then the entire subtree is either processed/rendered or bypassed/not rendered.

Note that the values of properties display and visibility have no effect on switch element processing. In particular, setting display to none on a child of a switch element has no effect on true/false testing associated with switch element processing.

Usage context

Categories	Container element
Permitted content	Any number of the following elements, in any order: Animation elements Descriptive elements Shape elements <a>, <foreignObject>, <g>, <image>, <svg>, <switch>, <text>, <use>

Attributes

Global attributes

• Conditional processing attributes
• Core attributes
• Graphical event attributes
• Presentation attributes
• class
• style
• externalResourcesRequired
• transform

DOM Interface

This element implements the SVGSwitchElement interface.

SVG <switch> example

This example demonstrates showing different text content depending on the browser's language settings. The switch element will display the first of its child elements whose systemLanguage attribute matches the user's language, or the element with no systemLanguage attribute if none of them matches.

HTML Content

<svg width="100%" viewBox="0 -20 100 50">
   <switch>
      <text systemLanguage="ar">مرحبا</text>
      <text systemLanguage="de,nl">Hallo!</text>
      <text systemLanguage="en">Hello!</text>
      <text systemLanguage="en-us">Howdy!</text>
      <text systemLanguage="en-gb">Wotcha!</text>
      <text systemLanguage="en-au">G'day!</text>
      <text systemLanguage="es">Hola!</text>
      <text systemLanguage="fr">Bonjour!</text>
      <text systemLanguage="ja">こんにちは</text>
      <text>☺</text>
   </switch>
</svg>

Result

Specifications

Specification	Status	Comment
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 2 The definition of '<switch>' in that specification.	Candidate Recommendation	Clarified the evaluation of the systemLanguage attribute
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 (Second Edition) The definition of '<switch>' in that specification.	Recommendation	Initial definition

Browser compatibility

[1] Starting with Firefox 50 (Firefox 50.0 / Thunderbird 50.0 / SeaMonkey 2.47) and the latest SVG specification, the allowReorder attribute has been dropped and the behavior it was setting is now the default.

The chart is based on these sources.