Vector Markup Language (VML) is an XML-based file format for two-dimensional vector graphics.
VML is specified in Part 4 of the Office Open XML standards ISO/IEC 29500 and ECMA-376. According to the specification, VML should be considered a deprecated format included in Office Open XML for legacy reasons only.
VML is pervasively used in MS Office 2007 (and later version) documents (i.e. Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents).
VML was submitted to the 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 PGML from Adobe Systems, Sun Microsystems, and others.
