SVG is an incredibly inefficient way to represent a line drawing,with all the coordinates written out as text, and not as deltas from the previous one. Flash's internal representation is much tighter, but not cool any more.
SVG can do relative coordinates fine: "m 10 10" (m dx dy) rather than "M 10 10" (M x y). But yes, they're text until you compress them.
Yes, but unless you round the floating point digits, you're going to use about as much bytes.
The parent is correct. At some point we gained a fear of binary formats, but binary formats are still the only way to transfer data efficiently.
Yes, flash had other problems. No, this doesn't make their point false.
Re:Web Graphics Done Right
by deafcalculus on Monday October 07, 2019 @02:43PM
(#21184479)
Is that really true with gzipping?
Browsers still need to unzip and parse the SVG, and store the DOM representation of it.
Re:Web Graphics Done Right
by social_quotient on Monday October 07, 2019 @10:16PM
(#21188019)
Any examples you mind sharing?
1. The PNGs tended to be MUCH smaller than the SVGs, and I think you'll find this likely whenever you have even a very minorly complicated graphic (the article points this out).
2. There is an issue on Android devices where scrolling was absolutely awful when there were lots of large SVGs on the page. This completely went away when we switched to PNGs.
I think the best recommendation is to store the initial image either as an SVG or very high resolution raster image, but then use an on-the-fly transforming CDN so you can experiment and easily get the right image (size and format) where necessary.