Show HN: A tool to build real websites built exclusively in SVG

I was getting really frustrated with CSS and HTML (I was originally a print designer), so built a tool for building websites using only SVG content.

It's essentially a website builder that uses Adobe Illustrator for creating pages.

The results so far have been really promising: - building websites is extremely rapid - very little debugging or verification is needed - it's easy to create beautiful content

Techniques that were trivially easy for me 30 years ago in print are still impossible in HTML. With SVG, I can just design the page without worrying about interlocking invisible boxes.

You can try it yourself — it's free, but you'll need to create an account for the hosting part.

The only tool I could find to create the SVG's was Adobe Illustrator, because it enables linked images and fonts, like regular HTML pages.

As far as I know, no other SVG editor except for Inkscape does this.

For now it's Mac only.

I was surprised it looks very good on mobile too. Will have a look later.

It also reminds me of flash, which had a similar selling point. Back in the day (early 2000's?) there was a trend building entire websites in flash only (requiring a browser plugin to be accessable). But svg is supported by any modern browser.

SVGs are powerful, and probably underused, especially now that browser support is nearly universal. What do you mean by “enables linked images and fonts”? I create SVGs as text, in Vim, as I do with HTML and CSS.

I revisited SVGs when redesigning a planetarium website (https://friendsoftheplanetarium.org/). I suppose I could have done all of it in CSS, but the code using SVG was simple and concise.

On the way I discovered a nasty bug in recent releases of the Blink engine (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=127442...). It should be fixed in the next release, but it makes me wonder if you are less likely to get correct rendering when using SVGs.

You can visit the site and resize your browser to get an idea. It just scales it down.

I would love an SVG editor browser plug-in that also contains authentication. When you are on a page you're authorized to edit, a browser button shows that you can modify the page.

It then works with a protocol, with implementation examples in different languages, to create/remove/hot update SVG files on any subscribed servers. The authentication can further allow viewing of content on those servers as well.

Any small Linode server could be your own private Google Drive for web-enabled Word and PowerPoint documents.