What exactly don't you understand? I find the W3C specs fairly well-written, actually. You declare a symbol in the defs section of an SVG image and you can ins

What exactly don't you understand? I find the W3C specs fairly well-written, actually. You declare a symbol in the defs section of an SVG image and you can instantiate it with use. E.g. <svg> <defs> <symbol id='foo'> <circle r='5' cx='10' cy='3'/> </symbol> </defs> <use xlink:href='#foo' x='2' y='5'/> <use xlink:href='#foo' x='10' y='10' fill='red' stroke='blue'/> </svg> (does not actually work, because namespaces are missing and the symbol likely is missing things like a viewbox, but just to get the general idea across)