4 ms·

I love SVG in general... I am curious to hear, is there any reason not to use them? Maybe that it's not as well supported on older browsers?

by pen2l 10y ago

edent 10y ago
The only serious argument I've heard against them is that it makes life easier for people who want to reverse engineer your graphics. But, frankly, I'm switching as much of my stuff over to them as possible.
Silhouette 10y ago
I am curious to hear, is there any reason not to use them? As an alternative image format to things like PNG? There aren't many, if it's an image that lends itself to a vector format in the first place. SVGs have been widely supported for some time, often have significant file size benefits as we see here, and scale cleanly to different screen resolutions. You have to go back to versions of IE that even the likes of Microsoft and Google won't support any more or to very old mobile devices to start running into general compatibility problems. One thing to be aware of is that you are effectively programming your graphics if you're using SVG, not just recording the image itself. If you start playing with the more powerful features, particularly using non-trivial filters, you might occasionally run into issues in the rendering code that turns your program into an on-screen image. Depending on how much of that code is in the browser itself and how much is delegated to the underlying OS/graphics drivers for acceleration, that can cause problems including slow display of images, distortion so the rendered image doesn't look right, or in extreme cases even hanging the browser or graphics driver if you're unlucky enough to trigger some underlying bug (which is obviously a rare result, but I have personally seen it happen in my own development work). For the kinds of very simple SVGs we're looking at here, I can't imagine any of these potential problems being a serious risk, though.
RazrFalcon 10y ago
It doesn't supported well even in modern browsers. There are so many edge-cases that are completely ignored. Yes, you probably newer encounter them, but they are still there.

I love SVG in general... I am curious to hear, is there any reason not to use them? Maybe that it's not as well supported on older browsers?

by pen2l 10y ago

I love SVG in general... I am curious to hear, is there any reason not to use them? Maybe that it's not as well supported on older browsers?

edent 10y ago

The only serious argument I've heard against them is that it makes life easier for people who want to reverse engineer your graphics. But, frankly, I'm switching as much of my stuff over to them as possible.

Silhouette 10y ago

I am curious to hear, is there any reason not to use them? As an alternative image format to things like PNG? There aren't many, if it's an image that lends itself to a vector format in the first place. SVGs have been widely supported for some time, often have significant file size benefits as we see here, and scale cleanly to different screen resolutions. You have to go back to versions of IE that even the likes of Microsoft and Google won't support any more or to very old mobile devices to start running into general compatibility problems. One thing to be aware of is that you are effectively programming your graphics if you're using SVG, not just recording the image itself. If you start playing with the more powerful features, particularly using non-trivial filters, you might occasionally run into issues in the rendering code that turns your program into an on-screen image. Depending on how much of that code is in the browser itself and how much is delegated to the underlying OS/graphics drivers for acceleration, that can cause problems including slow display of images, distortion so the rendered image doesn't look right, or in extreme cases even hanging the browser or graphics driver if you're unlucky enough to trigger some underlying bug (which is obviously a rare result, but I have personally seen it happen in my own development work). For the kinds of very simple SVGs we're looking at here, I can't imagine any of these potential problems being a serious risk, though.

RazrFalcon 10y ago

It doesn't supported well even in modern browsers. There are so many edge-cases that are completely ignored. Yes, you probably newer encounter them, but they are still there.