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I've never looked into svg specifically but I would assume that even if it's xml, it's generally far from reasonably human readable/editable, in which case you're not losing the properties by minimizing. Unreadable -> more unreadable is much less significant than readable -> unreadable

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That's why I hedged a bit. SVG is certainly less readable, but it can be human readable if not aggressively minimized.

I've both created and modified SVG documents by hand with a text editor, and also view-sourced SVGs to see how they work.

The only thing that is especially unreadable are the long strings of coordinates that make up paths, and even those can be manageable with comments. No one does complex paths by hand, but the rest is colors, shapes, transforms -- all things you can read and may want to modify.

SVGs are human readable and human writable.

I used SVG as a templating/markup language for years. We were writing software for a specialized, embedded, browser that only understood JS and SVG.

It only took a few days of acclimatization to move from writing HTML to writing SVG.

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