Something I hadn’t noticed until recently is that Wikipedia tries to use the browser’s native SVG support to render certain images. For example, if you search for a high resolution image of your country’s flag, you will probably end up viewing an SVG. Wikipedia also offers downloads to the image rendered as a PNG though.

Next to being able to scale to an arbitrary size without suffering data loss, the SVG data format allows images to be far more compact. Basically, SVG is just XML, which also means it can be easily compressed to make its size even smaller. For example, this is the (uncompressed) SVG for the flag of the Kingdom of Belgium.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="450" height="300">
    <rect width="450" height="300"/>
    <rect x="150" width="150" height="300" fill="#FAE042"/>
    <rect x="300" width="150" height="300" fill="#ED2939"/>
</svg>

This svg node only weighs as much as 224 bytes, while the image rendered as a high resolution PNG weighs 13.402 bytes. Stuff like that makes a significant difference when you’re serving millions of page views on a daily basis.

The first time I touched SVG was a few years ago when I was still working on fire department projects. We were working with a third party that used SVG to draw maps in the browser. Being already in the post-Google Maps era, I thought it was terrible I had to download Adobe’s SVG viewer. While the Google Maps technology already works great, there are still things SVG can do better and cleaner, especially for more specialized GIS applications. There is an interesting paper on that subject here, it’s a bit outdated though.

I can only applaud making the browser more capable, and losing yet another plug-in. I’m curious to see how other applications will start taking advantage of the opportunities native SVG support across all modern browsers (even Internet Explorer) presents.

Have you already built things using SVG? Or even considered it?