Ask HN: Is SVG Dying?

3 points·taivare··6 comments

Alive and kicking. SVG is often requested (or just included) as part of design assets; used for icons/logos/illustrations/charts/diagrams on the web; programmatically generated or manipulated (i.e., animation).. Language ecosystems usually have choices of parsers (less so renderers)..

Not sure what context you're referring to, but SVG is heavily used for displaying scalable logos and charts on the web. It's also heavily used for vector-based graphics and outputs to machines (ex. laser cutting) due to its relative simplicity and openness.

Why would it be dying? If anything, most companies are using it more. I'd like to see a binary format for SVG to make them smaller but keep the scalability.

Such format isn't really necessary, because http has protocol level compression that can get rid of text-based format inefficiencies. And in case you need it precompressed there is a compressed svg format - svgz.

I agree that svg is not dying, it's still growing.

Gzip isn't going to compress as well as a binary format would. SVG is XML and while it has text components that can be compressed, it will reach limits. Plus, if you compress the binary, it could be reduced even further.

Using a byte encoding for element types and numeric values over strings would likely dramatically reduce sizes. For example:

<z:rect x="0" y="0" width="10" height="10"/>

Could be binary encoded as something like:

00 00000000 00000000 00000110 00000110

(shape, x, y, width, height)

Total size of compress XML is probably 30-40 bytes. Final binary size is 16-18 bytes.

I don't think so. It's used heavily by D3. There are many useful applications of SVG for rendering on the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com