1. In a computing environment, a computer-implemented system for composing computer-displayable graphics, the system comprising: a high-level compositing and animation engine and a low-level engine, the high-level engine being instantiated on a per-application basis and the low-level engine servicing requests from multiple applications; a markup language, the markup language comprising graphics instructions, the graphics instructions comprising a string format and an object notation, the object notation comprising graphics elements from a graphics element class; a graphics object model comprising: a base class visual object which is a container for graphical content, which provides base functionality for other visual types and from which other visual types derive, a container visual object which is a container for visuals and which may contain other container visual objects, a drawing visual object which is a container for graphical content, and a graphics element class, the element class comprising a shape class, an image class, a video class, and a canvas class, and the element class being integrated with a general property system; a type converter, the type converter configured to convert a graphics instruction in string format to a visual application programming interface (API) object; a parser/translator, the parser/translator configured to a) interpret graphics instructions, the graphics instructions comprising direct code calls, object model code calls, and graphics instructions written using the markup language, b) access the type converter, the type converter configured to convert a graphics instruction in string format to a visual API object, and c) interpret the markup code and, upon interpreting the markup code, add elements of the graphics elements class to an element tree; a presenter system, the presenter system configured to translate graphics element trees into calls to a visual API; a visual API, the visual API configured to a) interface with the presenter system, interface with the parser/translator, and interface with direct code calls from programming languages, and b) in response to requests from the presenter system, the parser/translator, creates scene objects within a scene graph; and a display interface operable to facilitate display of the graphics objects within the scene graph.