If you really want to play with svg read a lot here http://www.carto.net/svg/samples/ although I wouldn't until you grasp how "normal" web works (HTML and CSS).

SVG is XML, when you're creating SVG you're actually writing XML code (text), or better yet Inkscape does it for you. Inkscape is an XML editor, but any good text editor is an XML editor. What's great about Inkscape is it provides a graphical interface to display the file and manipulate the file by clicking around the screen instead of typing text. Kewl ey!

A long time ago (which means a couple of years ago in Internet terms) a lot of buzz was made around XHTML - this was an attempt to "upgrade" HTML so it can become XML, or a subset of XML. A lot of developers embraced the rules that XHTML brings, and a lot of websites now use XHTML as their DOCTYPE. But that's a bit wrong, because to get full potential of XML you have to serve the pages with the correct mime type, meaning use XML/application or something like that, instead of html/text. Websites are still served as html/text because IEs don't get XHTML.

IE is still the greatest obstacle to spreading and using SVG as websites. I'm not sure SVG is completely suitable to replace HTML, the correct way would probably be a combination of both, where SVG would mostly be used for graphical enhancements.

All this means that theoretically HTML is a subset of XML but in practice there is still no way to make complete pages with XML.

When you export to png you lose links, png is a raster image, it cannot be interactive. You can enclose the img in anchor tags (HTML) so the whole will be clickable in your sig.

Try searching for <canvas> element and how it's related to SVG, also <embed>, but no one using IE as their browser won't be able to see SVG without plugins for it.

Oh wow, thanks for that great info, prkos.
I will read, and try to understand and learn the info at the link you gave.

You can enclose the img in anchor tags (HTML) so the whole will be clickable in your sig.

Ok, I'm not sure.....just thinking.....well, what I've made in Inkscape is basically my current signature with some simple graphics. What I was thinking is that maybe I could get past the limitation of characters in the sig, by putting all the text in an image. So the problem with making the whole image a link, is that there are 4 different links, and I would hope to add a couple more later. I don't know if making 4 or more tiny images will really save me very many characters. I guess maybe it could save a few...

Well, I guess it sounds like I'm not going to be able to put an image containing links into my signature. But regarding IE being the obstacle to the transition to the more functional SVG, I think I saw a recent post in the News and whatever it's called forum, where MS has asked to join some SVG working group at W3C (or something about W3C). So maybe there's a light up ahead

Anyway, thanks again for your help

PS I don't suppose it would be possible to embed an SVG img into a PNG, GIF, or JPG -- nah, I guess once I saved it, the links would still be lost