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SVG is an incredibly inefficient way to represent a line drawing,with all the coordinates written out as text, and not as deltas from the previous one. Flash's internal representation is much tighter, but not cool any more.

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SVG can do relative coordinates fine: "m 10 10" (m dx dy) rather than "M 10 10" (M x y). But yes, they're text until you compress them.

Yes, but unless you round the floating point digits, you're going to use about as much bytes.

The parent is correct. At some point we gained a fear of binary formats, but binary formats are still the only way to transfer data efficiently.

Yes, flash had other problems. No, this doesn't make their point false.

Is that really true with gzipping?

Browsers still need to unzip and parse the SVG, and store the DOM representation of it.

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