I'm working on an interactive interface using SVG and JavaScript/jQuery, and I'm trying to decide between Raphael and jQuery SVG. I'd like to know
I don't need the VML/IE support in Raphael, or the plotting abilities of jQuery SVG. I'm primarily interested in the most elegant way to create, animate, and manipulate individual items on an SVG canvas.
I'm a huge fan of Raphael and the development momentum seems to be going strong (version 0.85 was released late last week). Another big plus is that its developer, Dmitry Baranovskiy, is currently working on a Raphael charting plugin, g.raphael, which looks like its shaping up to be pretty slick (there are a few samples of the output from the early versions on Flickr).
However, just to throw another possible contender into the SVG library mix, Google's SVG Web looks very promising indeed (even though I'm not a big fan of Flash, which it uses to render in non-SVG compliant browsers). Probably one to watch, especially with the upcoming SVG Open conference.
I think it is not totally unrelated but did you consider canvas? something like Process JS can make it simpler.
I will throw my vote behind Raphael - the cross-browser support, clean API and consistent updates (so far) make it a joy to use. It plays very nicely with jQuery too. Processing is cool, but more useful as a demo for bleeding-edge stuff at the moment.