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Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

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Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#11

Post by jahewson »

SVG implementations on browsers have historically been poor, though this is certainly improving. You'll hit many bugs and unsupported features. IE The worst problem may be SVG itself - SVG 1.2 which dates from 2004 was abandoned, and most browsers implement SVG 1.1 which is rather lacking in features. This makes it hard if you're a designer to produce SVG documents which a browser can actually render.

At a bare minimum any SVG hosting project would have to involve some sort of SVG lint, to make sure that browser-incompatible SVG elements are not present, implement workarounds for browser-specific bugs, and check that there are no tags etc. The sheer size and complexity of even SVG 1.1 makes it non-trivial. One pragmatic approach to sanitize SVG may be to round-trip SVG -> PDF -> SVG via cairosvg and pdftocairo, though it may burn some CPU.

Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#12

Post by tobyink »

KorvinSzanto wrote: post #3
lsiebert wrote: post #2

It's not hard. However, I'd note that IE didn't have built in support until 2011, and the first browser with native svg support was Konqueror in 2004, whereas gif and jpeg have been around for a lot longer. Isn't SVG just XML? I'd assume you could host it that way.

It's XML based, really only uses a different schema.

What schema does XML normally use?

Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#14

Post by JD557 »

lmm wrote: post #4

XML being XML, it's hard-to-impossible to host SVG without allowing people to store arbitrary XML on your service, which sooner or later is going to be abused.

Also, Its possible to use script tags to run javascript code in an svg.

If you really wanted to, you could pretty much make your own webpage run on the image hosting server.

Also, you could send a malicious script to someone hidden in a cute cat drawing, and it would look like it was the host's fault.

Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#16

Post by drhowarddrfine »

jahewson wrote: post #11

SVG implementations on browsers have historically been poor, though this is certainly improving. You'll hit many bugs and unsupported features. IE The worst problem may be SVG itself - SVG 1.2 which dates from 2004 was abandoned, and most browsers implement SVG 1.1 which is rather lacking in features. This makes it hard if you're a designer to produce SVG documents which a browser can actually render. At a bare minim…

Any technology on the web that's not supported well is due to IE not supporting it. IE always holds back the web.

Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#17

Post by threedaymonk »

lmm wrote: post #4

XML being XML, it's hard-to-impossible to host SVG without allowing people to store arbitrary XML on your service, which sooner or later is going to be abused.

I don't think this has to be a problem: it's actually rather straightforward to write some XSLT to process incoming XML and emit only whitelisted elements and attributes.

Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#18

Post by emn13 »

lmm wrote: post #4

XML being XML, it's hard-to-impossible to host SVG without allowing people to store arbitrary XML on your service, which sooner or later is going to be abused.

That's true for almost any hosting service - it's usually quite easy to encode other information in whatever wrapper is possible. Virtually all image formats (for instance) allow arbitrary metadata, and usually of arbitrary size. And if meta-data isn't allowed, a lossless format like PNG can easily be reinterpreted as a simple byte-array (e.g. 8bpp greyscale image).

Of course, why would anyone bother? It's that hard to find hosters that will host anything, so why do through the hassle to encruft your data with some somewhat unwieldy wrapper?

The fact that it's XML is in some way a "protection" here since for no particularly good reason some character codes cannot be represented by xml (not even encoded), meaning you'll need ugly workarounds to store arbitrary data.

Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#19

Post by youngtaff »

My question is why do you want to host your SVG images elsewhere?

If you just want to shop them you could convert them to bitmap or host them on GitHub

If you want to include them on your website, they're small and compress well with gzip so why have the complexity of relying on a third party services

It you have too much traffic to be able to host them yourself then you should look at something like a CDN e.g. Cloudfront, infront of S3

Re: Ask HN:Whats the problem with SVG?

#20

Post by ChuckMcM »

jahewson wrote: post #11

SVG implementations on browsers have historically been poor, though this is certainly improving. You'll hit many bugs and unsupported features. IE The worst problem may be SVG itself - SVG 1.2 which dates from 2004 was abandoned, and most browsers implement SVG 1.1 which is rather lacking in features. This makes it hard if you're a designer to produce SVG documents which a browser can actually render. At a bare minim…

This is perhaps the best answer, browser support is poor. Rendering SVG to PNG prior to shipping it out works but you really want to cache it, not do that in real time.

I keep hoping that epub will generate a renaissance of interest in SVG. So far no luck.

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