Pixelfans

5 Sep 2011

SVG in the eyes of a webdesigner

geschrieben von Pawel

Introduction

With all the hype about brand-new XML formats in 2001, like the newborn SVG, it progressively became quiet. Sure, Adobe had published their plug-in, but the Flash plug-in was also on the rise. These days however,a decade later, no modern Desktop browser needs a plug-in to display SVG anymore. It’s time to use SVG in web-design.

Preparations

There are a lot of well-known programs in the design business. But most of these products were originally made for printing purposes, even though they were later improved to support the writing of SVG-files. In my opinion a file of 150 to 200kbyte is no issue if you want to print it, but it’s way too big for the web. In conclusion to that and because of the existing idea of the semantic web, I advise to specifically consider creating an SVG for the use in web-design. My tool of choice is Inkscape.

Inkscape

Inkscape is made for creating SVG. It’s the native format and it may seem like it might not be completely ready yet. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the version number. A number like 0.48 is the understatement by GPL, but there are some limitations you should know and work around that.

The Swiss knife - always a path

Inkscape mostly saves simple forms as paths, but a person can grasp the command to create of circle better than understand the exact same shape as a couple of points in a path. Change the markup at the end again in the simple form. On top of that, the size of the file becomes smaller.

Use gradients and filters twice or more

An object gets properties. As an standard in Inkscape any filter or gradient is bound to one object. The blur-filter is often used. To change the standard behaviour open the filter dialog which contains a powerful filter editor. You can use all of the filters on more than one object, the process will also reduce the size of the SVG-file.The same feature would be nice for gradients, but unfortunately I only know to code this per hand.

No clone wars

In a lot of cases you will take the same shape. Inkscape offers a way to duplicate the shape, but it is mostly better to use the clone tool. A clone is a use-element and will make rendering faster and the size of the file becomes even smaller, because a use is only a reference and not a couple of points.

Use name which are describing the objects

For further work with your editor, you should get a describing name for the objects or groups. By a right click on the object, you will get a dialog box and be able to do this.

Save the file as optimized SVG

With the version 0.48 Inkscape offers this. In this case unused gradients or filters will be removed from the file and saved in a compact way.

Optimized your code in a editor

Clean up the doctype

First of all, you can clean up the doctype. The rdf-declaration and the meta-tags are not really needed. I advise to you a compact version.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" id="myID" version="1.1">

Check any kind of abstraction

Find out which gradients you can use for a couple of objects. Use styles, if it’s possible.

Round floats

In my experience, such a high accuracy is not really needed. You can reduce the size of a file enormously by rounding floats. In some cases you can round the point from float to integer, sometimes you need 1-2 Decimal, e.g. in the matrix-Attribute. I use some needful bash-scripts to do that.

Use the title element

One of the advantages of the format is that each element can be equipped with a title. Because of that, you can describe the content further and maybe Google likes that, too.

Put it together

With the upcoming HTML5 specifiation we get a simple way the use a SVG inline in a HTML. Personally, I prefer a way to use a switch in combination with foreign objects.

The switch-element is very powerful. If the browser understands the path command, like all modern browsers, the foreign object will not be displayed. Browsers, like Konqueror or old Internet Explorers display the content within the foreign object. You can combine this with conditional comments.

That sounds great but...

Yes I know, what you are going to say. There is a workaround for the Internet Explore up to version 8, you can use a VML.

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Kategorie: CSS , Ideen , SVG | Kommentare (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink