SVGs that feel like GIFs | Hacker News Reader

SVGs that feel like GIFs

koaning.io

540 pointscantdutchthis134 comments

You can do a lot of impressive things with SVGs. Some examples from Wikipedia (no JS in any)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/SMIL_mis... missile command clone

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/London_U... tube map

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Rolling_... rolling shutter animation

I like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/London_U.... It shows step-free areas for wheelchair users. It is pretty useful to me.

As for the first link, I immediately had to come up with a way to click on the warheads programmatically. I saved the world! :D

As an American I always forget that the ADA is kind of unique in the world.

It would never even enter my mind that every single subway stop isn’t wheelchair accessible.

SVG started as an open competitor to Shockwave/Flash Player and also an application format for PDAs. It almost got networking support once.

Too bad nothing has ever come close to replacing the SWF format.

You could pack so much into a single binary distributable media file. Games, videos, websites, infographics, tools, chat rooms.

SWF was brilliant and it should have thrived.

absolutely. really is strange that you used to be able to download a music video in less than 2-3mb with lossless video quality, but now that's not really a thing anymore. I feel like if Adobe didn't get greedy and encourage its use for absolutely everything (and/or web standards got up to speed faster) people wouldn't wouldn't approach talking about Flash with the 10-foot pole they often do today (as a platform—not how everyone talks about how much they loved flash games)

People loved the games, but not the super custom flash based menu that requires a loading bar and works totally different and slightly janky on each website.

A time before HIGs.. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03/macromedia-fla...

What do you mean by “HD music video”? If you mean a literal video, then today’s video and audio codecs are more efficient than what Flash used, not less. If the music videos were that small then they must have given up a lot in quality. If you mean a Flash vector animation, then that’s different of course, but that doesn’t describe a typical music video.

Conventional video codecs are also pretty good at compressing animations. I once made a multi-minute animation of a plane taking off and H.264 compresses it to hundreds of kilobytes.

yes i mean vectors, of course theres some cheating to reach that figure ;)

That's because people have more bandwidth today and therefore videos online are higher quality now. You can easily transcode a music video to 3MB using modern codecs (and even not so modern ones like H.264), and it will look somewhat worse than typical online video sites but still pretty good.

What do you mean? Lossless animations with a soundtrack or some embeded video?

This is 570k and runs in a webassembly runtime:

https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

SVG could do that too. Minimal javascript plus audio tags.

http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg

>badger.swf

yes stuff like that & the IOSYS MVs. you technically can do stuff like that today theres nothing stopping you from doing it with svgs but i meant more the social part of it. its just interesting that if you want to do the same thing (put an animated video on the inernet) the usual way its now 10x bigger yet looks worse.

also i dont think theres anything like Flash (the authoring software) but for SVGs. i hope there is one but for now I wouldnt say inkscape + a text editor counts

Honestly, we can have that today. The real power of Flash was the fully integrated development environment. It was one of the first programming experiences I had, and all I needed to do amazing stuff was a book and a copy of Flash MX.

One of my own first programming experiences was when my dad bought me a copy of Dreamweaver and a book about it. To this day I still ponder what might have happened if I was instead given a copy of Flash instead.

Adobe needed to take Flash seriously as a platform. Instead they neglected it, making it synonymous with crashes and security problems, and they milked developers as much as possible.

I bought Flash once. I found a crashing bug and jumped through hoops reporting it. A year or so later, they updated the ticket to suggest I drop $800 for the privilege of seeing whether it had been fixed. I did not make the mistake of giving them money ever again.

They had such an opportunity to take advantage of a platform with a pre-iPhone deployment in the high 90% range, and they just skimped it into oblivion. What a disgrace for everyone who actually cared.

Yes seriously. At that time Steve Jobs was harping on HTML5 and CSS3 being open standards but Flash not. Adobe could have ensured Flash's survival by making Flash an open standard (much like it has made PDF an open standard where the specification is free to everyone) and making Adobe Flash only one of the possible authoring tools, and the Flash Player only one of the player tools. Basically they should have invited the community and other companies to make more Flash tooling while continuing to sell their own. Given how often I see people still paying for Acrobat Pro today, I think this is a good business strategy too.

What else was wildly cool about Flash was that the player itself was a shockingly tiny download -- even on 56K it was an incredibly fast download, and because we were all using MSIE then, the installation of this ActiveX thing that was the Flash Player required like one quick click and it was installed, and in 5 seconds you were seeing the Flash content.

Obviously the fact that it was that low-friction to install any non-sandboxed application code was a very naïve thing to allow, but I still have to hand it to the Macromedia developers for packing the whole player into such a tiny download and making it so frictionless. I'm pretty sure that had a HUGE impact on its adoption over say, Java applets. Java took a lot more time and effort to install, and while it had decent penetration (many "chat room" services and in-browser games like Yahoo Games used Java) it was never taken for granted that 'everyone has it' the way Flash was (until Steve Jobs singlehandedly burned that assumption to the ground with fire).

If it weren't for Adobe's crappy support of the player, I would agree, but they did much more harm than good with it. It was a massive attack surface and they didn't care about closing their zero-day drive-by exploits in a sensible timeframe.

Also they were basically the founders of persistent fingerprinting via Flash cookies.

So no, thank you, I'm more than happy it didn't thrive more than it already did.

SWF was simultaneously brilliant and a festering wound that required amputation, and I would have welcomed a replacement that wasn't the biggest attack surface on the internet. I too love Homestar Runner.

IMO the fact that it belonged to Adobe was the biggest problem, if SWF had been managed by a more capable software org it could have been maintained in a way that kept it from getting banned from the internet. And remember, that's how bad it was - it got banned from the internet because it was absolutely indefensible to leave it around. SWF getting cancelled magically stopped every single family member I have from calling me with weird viruses and corruption they managed to stumble into. I saw more malicious code execution through SWF than I saw from my dumb little cousins torrenting sus ROMs and photoshop crackers. I'd rather not have it than have those problems persist.

Working as an eLearning dev around flash is what got me to completely disable it on my home computer... only in a VM, where I would reset after use was I ever using it. It was useful, but way too easy to abuse.

I'm still amazed that the Adobe buyout of Macromedia didn't see the Flash tooling used to target Manifest + SVG + JS/ES4/ActionScript3 as an evolution from the Flash format preceding it given their efforts with SVG prior to the buyout. I was really hoping they would pivot to creating great tooling around a more open format. Silverlight (MS) also had a chance around this time.

In the end, that's just not what happened. I also feel there's no reason an offline web-app shouldn't be able to be packaged/zipped similarly, instead of just a caching mechanism around separate http(s) delivered files.

Huh? SVG stands for scalable vector graphics.

Functionally, it can do a lot of the same things as SWF/Flash. Can do animations (see article) and it's scriptable using JavaScript for interactivity.

And JavaScript starts with Java. Naming is hard.

And is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation, so you better not write it down anywhere or the lawnmower will get you.

Thank fuck it didn't. I can't fathom how quickly the obnoxious advertiser industrial complex would've grabbed hold of that and invented whole new genres of shoving products in our collective face.

as opposed to today...?

Look I'm not saying they aren't doing it now I'm just saying one less vector for it makes me happy

> It almost got networking support once.

SVG support full javascript. It has networking support.

(In web browsers the <img> tag allows only restricted subset, butbyou get the full thing with iframe)

I think the above comment refers to the proposal for SVG 1.2 (which never shipped) to include an API for opening raw network sockets: https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20040510/#rawsocket

(It observes that this feature raises certain security risks, but promises to figure out by the next draft how to fix them. This of course never happened.)

I recall Hixie had a funny rant about this, but I can't find it.

Thanks, i wasn't aware of that. That is crazy.

That checkbox feature in the Tube Map is awesome. I need to up my SVG game.

Bookmarked!

Try clicking on a line's name in the key. Very impressive map.

Wow, thank you for pointing this out. Map went from 10/10 to 11/10

After reading the headline and before reading the article, I thought it'd be something like a visual hash of readme files, as an easy way to see if anything had changed between releases.

I was thinking that might be a useful thing for people to spot when a ToS, EULA, etc. changed since those are long documents that frequently get sneaky revisions.

That first link doesn't work in Safari, and I'm really wondering what's missing. Clicking the button works, but clicking the warheads does nothing. I also don't get the crosshairs cursors that I see when I try this in Firefox.

I really like the timer display in that missile command clone. The animated numbers make it easy to keep time with it in your peripheral vision.

I have an animated SVG on my README that is rebuilt once a day to include the weather and day of the week. Built during jury duty a few years ago :P https://github.com/jasonlong

This is so cool!

Looks great!

If the target is a GitHub readme, then you can embed a video directly. eg https://github.com/paulirish/git-recent#readme

That said, OP's SVG trick may be a smarter choice if the content is a terminal capture.

If you're going this route of adding a straight up video (which isn't bad!) it helps to edit the readme directly on GitHub. That way they're uploaded to githubusercontent (or whatever the domain is) and not taking up space in your repository.

Were people doing that other option?

The idea of committing a video to your repository for a PR seems silly. Every PR adds a new video to the codebase? Do you make a PR to prune them every once in a while?

> Every PR adds a new video to the codebase

Git commits only differences with the precedent commit, not the entire repository. Therefore the video is only committed once as long as that video doesn’t change.

The nice thing about videos is the play/pause/slider UI. Some platforms do add play/pause explicitly to GIFs, using some JS, but as far as I know (and you would know more), that's not built into browsers yet. That's been one of the reasons I often end up using videos instead.

When I've personally animated SVGs for use in RevealJS presentations, I tend to use CSS animations that I could control with JS if I wanted.

If this gets widespread use, browsers will catch up and in 5-10 years we will have pause buttons! ;)

Meanwhile we are still have a stupid overlay controls because 20 years ago it was an iframe for an ActiveX control.

An animated GIF is essentially a video with a large number of restrictions and poor compression compared to an actual video. Often sites convert animated GIFs to videos because the result is smaller and works better.

The SVG trick is less usable for screen captures IMO, since you lose controls.

I think it's best for embedding a motion demo of a feature your software provides, no more than 5 seconds. Even then, a video option may be useful to some people.

SVG can be color responsive (change color based on the user's dark/light prefs). It can also be size responsive (change based on max width or aspect). Video can't

https://jsbin.com/nohamuguze/edit?html,css,output

edit: sigh.... Works in Firefox and Chrome. Has issues in Safari - I'm sure I could futs with it more and get it to work everywhere but still, sadness

wow Paul I haven't seen your name in years but loved what you used to do with Echo Nest and the Rdio API <3

That mighta been Paul Lamere, but.. Then again I did fuck around with Echo Nest stuff forever ago.

It's pretty unintuitive that you can just copy text straight from an animation, but that's the neatest part of this!

What would be wild is if the animation pauses on mouse-over.

It's quite a challenge for copy-paste to be useful when the terminal is scrolling.

Same, or start/stop/back/forward support. I like those neat Github gifs, but hate that I sometimes have to download it and open it frame by frame to see / copy executed commands in certain projs.

Tools for making animated SVGs from terminal recordings:

asciinema2svg: https://github.com/thenets/asciinema2svg

termsvg: https://github.com/MrMarble/termsvg

/? terminal svg: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=terminal+svg

/? svg animation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

A word of caution: There are SVGs which can freeze a page, so make sure that you do not link to any third party SVGs. This is a known bug, but both the Google Chrome and Mozilla team do not want to fix it.

Here is an evil example SVG for demonstration.

DON'T CLICK THIS LINK UNLESS YOU WANT TO RISK CRASHING YOUR BROWSER!

https://asdf10.com/danger.svg

Crash a single page or even the whole browser isn't really a security problem though. In fact, there are so many ways to freeze the whole tab or even browser ui with build-in function if you apply it way too many times. (For example, a long chain of blur filters will make the chrome ui non responsive because the render time will skyrocket.)

Although if the affect area does escape the tab, the issue will have higher priority because that would be annoying to user.

Wait so are recursive XXE attacks like (I'm assuming) this one possible on Github READMEs? Or have they somehow mitigated them?

I think external entities can be disabled completely right, but who knows, it may pay off to check out what GH did here :)

It's recursive, but not XXE. It is 20 layers of nested SVG groups, where the first group contains 10 blue circles, and every subsequent group contains 10 of the previous group. This would render as around 10^20 blue circles.

SVG is XML-based, unlike HTML which follows the SGML spec

From curling the malicious page you can also see:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
        <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="1000" height="1000">

Yes, SVGs are XML-based and may be vulnerable to generic XML-based XML external entity (XXE) or exponential entity expansion attacks, but this particular malicious SVG is using SVG-specific features to create the resource exhaustion.

"SVG is inherently animated" is new to me, and now I'm going to spend my time on the bus thinking what might be done with that. Does it support infinite loop?

> Does it support infinite loop?

Yes it does.

https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/svg_animation.asp - Has some examples, you may need to refresh to see some of them (ones that don't repeat) in action as you scroll down the page.

Yes

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

  <svg viewBox="0 0 10 10" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <rect width="10" height="10">
    <animate
      attributeName="rx"
      values="0;5;0"
      dur="10s"
      repeatCount="indefinite" />
  </rect>
  </svg>

> Does it support infinite loop?

Yes, by setting the repeatCount or repeatDur attribute of the <animate> tag to "indefinite". Notably, since <animation> tags effect individual attributes and not the image as a whole, different parts of the image can be on different animation cycles and don't have to add up to some small common multiple.

That smells like Turing complete

Tomorrow on HN: GPT-2 in pure SVG

SVG embeds Ecmascript (or Javascript as the rest of the world knows it): https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/script.html

So not only do you get all the animation support from the attributes, you can fill in anything you need from scripting.

I like little TIL posts like this, introducing new tools and sharing first-hand experiences with them. Working around restrictions (like using animations in Github Markdown) leads to this kind of creative stuff. I looked at the resulting SVG https://koaning.io/posts/svg-gifs/parrot.svg and realised that a lot of inline SVG elements are used within inline SVG within..the SVG. I've never seen that before. So thank you very much for sharing.

So one could make a quine: an animated SVG that shows its own source code being typed into a text editor

I freakin love SVG. Someday I hope we just end up with a browser standard:

* pluggable execution engine/memory model (WASM, JVM, CLR, etc)

* SVG output (binary or text)

From there, the developer can choose whatever model he wants to display a "page", no longer be limited to the Document Object Model.

Once upon a time, Flash, Java, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc. ruled the web.

I think the world is _much_ better off today, with a common language and platform. I don't think those big third party runtimes could survive in the browser in today's threat environment.

Unfortunately "common" means being what Google wants, and they abuse their market position to push whatever through (advertising support in an HTML client... what?)

The DOM (HTML) has the advantage that it's designed to be responsive to different displays. SVG is not

> From there, the developer can choose whatever model he wants to display a "page", no longer be limited to the Document Object Model.

How are apps like AutoCAD Web, Photopea, Figma, Google Docs, Google Earth Web, and Flutter for Web apps (CanvasKit) different than what you're asking for? AFAIK developers aren't forced to use the DOM for applications where it's not the best choice.

For some sick reason now I really want to convert some SVG architecture diagrams to movies which reveal the nodes in a dramatic anime battle style with zoom-ins, freeze frames, pulsating lines around, etc.

Well, this is cool. I'll have to see how it handles the sorts of effects I show in the README at https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects. I don't know much about SVG but anything that attempts to actually store the text is going to create a very large amount of data. I'll try it for fun.

For anyone interested, here’s my animated GitHub readme: https://github.com/edwinm

Fun fact: since an SVG is technically code and not a binary image file, LLMs are capable of writing them! I tested this with Claude Sonnet 4 and within 7 minutes I was able to describe what I wanted the animated logo to do, and it delivered the SVG faithfully. Even embedded it into the README.md

I used SVG animations (and sites like https://www.svgator.com/) long before stuff like Rive or Lottie was commonplace. SVG animations are great.

For those interested in the crazy things SVG can do, Sarah Drasner’s talk is a must.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4laPOtTRteI

What does “Github supports these” mean here? Isn’t it the browser that has to support them?

Github could (should) be doing some sanitation of the HTML included in the readme, so they absolutely could be removing some nasty things SVGs support

But it’s just an image link to some SVG file. No HTML involved, only a Markdown image link that GitHub will render as an HTML <img src="…"/> element. The actual SVG file linked to isn’t even necessarily hosted by GitHub.

They could follow the img src and deny any which are harmful. Or even replace them with a sanitized copy.

This is nonsense. The actual file at the URL could change at any time. No system is doing something like that if it isn’t serving the file itself.

And, getting back to the original point, you wouldn’t be worrying that GitHub doesn’t “support” a URL that happens to point to a file of a particular subformat that the URL itself doesn’t disclose.

Doesn't Github already replace externally linked images with its own cached version when rendering out Markdown files?

GitHub definitely mirrors images. Any image you see on a README will be loaded from githubusercontent.com

If the SVG being linked to is hosted by GitHub, they could make arbitrary changes before serving it to the browser. IIRC, I uploaded an SVG in a GitHub comment and the resulting image had some of its interactive functionality removed. Of course, that situation is slightly different since the file was uploaded in a comment and not as part of a Git repo... but still.

I can’t comment on this one specifically, but SVG animations take notably more CPU usage to render/animate in Chromium browsers compared to GIF or WAAPI. And they block the main thread for at least some animations.

That's pretty typical. Every element of an SVG is an object with a bunch of properties that can be manipulated and scripted and whatnot. It's great for a lot of things, but it's a lot more resource intensive than "dump this set of pixels onto the screen here" like GIF does or even "perform this set of drawing commands" like HTML canvas does.

Using SVG for Demos is much better than GIFs or Videos due to the lightweight nature. We have created a tool to make the recording and sharing CLI tool demos much easier: https://github.com/DeepGuide-Ai/dg . Simply call `dg capture` and it generates the svg and content ready to paste to README. An added benefit is it can be used for CI validations. It utilizes termsvg under the hood. Would love your comments.

This is very cool and useful for the readmes. Thank you for sharing

I’m wondering what other applications this could have

At least every CLI/terminal tool could use it to showcase their application

Also looks like this is supported in Gitlab as well!

Example from the Mariner repo[1] after doing a quick google and finding a link to the site.

[1] https://gitlab.com/radek-sprta/mariner/blob/master/README.md

That is terrifying. Does look great though!

I thought people were just doing GIF color palette optimization with ffmpeg instead.

Why “terrifying”?

I think some have only heard bad things about SVG exploits but perhaps aren't familiar that IMG embedded SVGs (like those used in Github readmes) don't carry those risks as they're restricted from running Javascript, external content or videos.

Ahhh that would make sense. Thanks for the explanation

there's also an apng standard that almost noone makes use of despite not being patent uncumbered like gif is and it does a good job compressing more "pixel art" or line drawings in the way gif does. (tends to be a bit less efficient with actual photographs)

It's actually supported in all major browsers now, too: https://caniuse.com/apng

And even in software which don't support APNG, it'll render as the first frame of the animation, which is probably a fine fallback.

GIF hasn't been patent-encumbered since 2004. APNG was initially released in 2004. MNG was earlier, but didn't catch on.

Cool, but I’m not clear on why you have to upload and then download your cast file to make this work.

I don't think you do. The --in param on svg-term-cli worked for me locally.

Don't need to upload. I just tested this out because I didn't want to have to upload to asciinema:

  $ asciinema rec test.cast
  <do stuff in the terminal then ctrl-d>
  $ cat test.cast | svg-term --out=test.svg

And voila, no upload needed.

edit: formatting

I've been waiting forever for email to support SVG. And the wait continues.

Gmail get it together!

https://www.caniemail.com/features/image-svg/

Hmm, can you try to sniff it by the MX servers used? (i.e. if address ends with @gmail.com or MX resolves to *.google.com, send PNG instead)

I find it interesting that GIFs went from being implied to be bad quality to being a market of good quality despite little actually changing except for bandwidth.

I'm pretty sure no one has ever considered GIFs to be high quality. Unless you're a soft-G GIF person describing it to a confused person who thinks you mean the peanut butter :)

I'm late to the party, but can anybody explain how that works? I am looking at the SVG source and I'm very confused.

Obligatory mention of Sarah Drasner's fantastic (and somehow still valid and eye-opening in 2025) "SVGs Can Do That?" talk from 2017: https://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do-that

Today I learned something new, thx!

How do you pause/rewind it to actually read that terminal command?

anyone knows if it's possible to convert gif to svg or mp4? for instance, I'd like to share a screen recording in svg. It might sound like a dumb idea, maybe it is

just record as mp4 in the first place, gif has limited colour palette, low frame rate and poor compression

it does, however I use it to send short demos when needed. GIF is perfect, small size, resolution isn't critical, it's a perfect choice for me. I don't like sending 300Mb of video every time I have a small thing to demonstrate, GIFs on the other hand work like a charm. Which is why I am shopping for alternatives

You probably don't want a vector format for screen recording, unless you have a very strange screen. You want a raster format.

And sure, you can convert GIF to MP4, but I would question the workflow of anyone using animated GIFs for screen capture in the first place.

Github supports SVG but doesn't support AVIF still.

iOS only recently added support for AVIF, and there are still some in use devices which can't update to a version which supports it.

I don't think it's a big reason not to allow it, since they allow webm with AV1 video which shouldn't be any better than AVIF in practice for compatibility purposes.

Glad this was brought back to attention!

SVG is another proof of worse is better. Nothing should be animated via JavaScript, at least not imperatively.

but SVG embeds ECMAScript...

Fairly sure there are SVG subsets that can be used. Not all of them embed JS.

And that wasn't my point. SVG supports animation primitives. No need to animate through JS.

You're confusing language and runtime environment. SVG lets you use ecmascript of some version in its <script> tags, it obviously doesn't provide browser api available to you from javascript in a browser.

> And that wasn't my point. SVG supports animation primitives. No need to animate through JS.

This isn't (AFAICT) animated via JS. (It's animated by a CSS animation, inside the SVG. TFA is wrong about the <animate> tag being what is leveraged.)

true, but script tags don't run when used in img tags which is how they work on Github READMEs

This is nice until you realize `svg-term-cli` appears to be abandoned

https://github.com/marionebl/svg-term-cli/commits/master/

Last commit ~6 years ago. Does not appear to be any viable forks either.

Fortunately, I use nix to manage my system which sort of forces me to inspect the maintenance history of projects. Better than blindly installing `npm` packages in global namespace.

asciinema on the other hand is very interesting. Seems I can do without the svg aspect here, but something to keep in mind (svg animations).

Did you hit a bug or security issue that's blocking you from using it?

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