The International Color Consortium (ICC) was formed in 1993 in order to develop a color management system that would be cross-platform, industry-wide, and vendor-neutral. The resulting ICC color profiles allow the accurate transformation of one device's color space to another's. For instance, the color of a logo printed on one device can be accurately represented on-screen as well as in documents on a variety of platforms.

SVG documents can specify an input color space. The "color-profile" property identifies the ICC profile that should be used to process all <icc-color> definitions within the current object. SVG's default color profile uses the sRGB color space; however, you may specify a URL or standard name of another ICC input profile to use instead.

The example below uses sRGB color values in the red "S V G" elements as follow:

fill:red icc-color(myRGB,0.35294,0,0);fill-opacity:.5;
stroke:#0000FF icc-color(myRGB,0.50196,0,0.50196);

Your browser will display the specified colors only if you have a color management system installed (standard with Windows 98 and the Mac OS). If you do not have such a system, the sRGB colors that appear before the ICC colors would display, instead (here the fill would be "red" and the stroke "#0000FF").

The ability to reference an ICC color profile can be critical when dealing with images where color representation is important. Accurately portraying commercial items or corporate identities in terms of color is an important feature of SVG — especially when you consider SVG's printing ability.

Next lesson: Printing