what the heck!! that is so wild, mind blowing, i thought the main difference between raster graphics and vector graphics was the quality but i didn’t think about it too deeply.
i had no idea svg files actually used html code and pretty much could be modified using only text and amazing code woa!!! this opens up the possibility for so many things on linux i think.
for example, on a linux distro, we could modify the desktop environment and make it waaaaay lighter by getting rid of jpg or png icons and just using pure svg on it.
svg can be given a lot of attributes like movement, mouse hovering, change color, change anything. and most svg files are still under a megabyte. wow… please let me know other fun facts about svg or eps files. i really like doing graphic design on linux and inkscape.
No, SVG files are not HTML.
Please change this post title (currently “today i learned: svg files are literally just html code”), to avoid spreading this incorrect factoid!
I suggest you change it to “today i learned: svg files are just text in an html-like language” or something like that.
XML and HTML have many similarities, because they both are descendants of SGML. But, as others have noted in this thread, HTML is also not XML. (Except for when it’s XHTML…)
Like HTML, SVG also can use CSS, and, in some environments (eg, in browsers, but not in Inkscape) also JavaScript. But, the styles you can specify with CSS in SVG are quite different than those you can specify with CSS in HTML.
Lastly, you can embed SVG in HTML and it will work in (modern) browsers. You cannot embed HTML in SVG, however.
ok thank you very much!!
You know how they say that the internet is a series of tubes? We used to think that was just a funny old man. Turns out, it is the literal truth. The internet is made up of SVG files!
Oooh, neat! [Cunningham’s Law] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham’s_Law) in action!
for example, on a linux distro, we could modify the desktop environment and make it waaaaay lighter by getting rid of jpg or png icons and just using pure svg on it.
Isn’t that how it already works? GNOME system icons are all SVG - that’s what allows them to change colors when you change themes or switch between light and dark mode.
There are both, PNG as standard sizes and the SVGs. I believe the DE pulls the 32 48 256 pixel pngs so no addition rendering is needed.
i didn’t know that, is that the same in xfce??
hard to tell, but you can check it:
find / -type f -name *.svgmaybe also include
-xdevif you have an external drive that doesn’t hold any system files.
I don’t think it would be lighter, SVGs need a rendering tool to read the code and draw the artwork for the vector based images. This has always been slower than just displaying a bmp, jpg, or PNG.
It’s lighter in memory. on android (development) it has been said for a few years now that it’s better to use them for most cases, because android apps tend to use a ton of icons and this way they are small, themable, scaleable (the other option is to include multiple versions with diff resolutions), and can even have animations. it can basically save a lot of space.
but of course that will make no difference when the apps are 180 MB, partly because of the same 30 MB native libs being bundled for 4 different CPU architectures, because wasteful the dev didn’t bother to produce different APKs for the different kinds of CPUs. and similar project mismanagement things.
No, it’s XML. It’s an ancestor of HTML and, unlike HTML, it can be losslessly converted.
Not quite. XML came several years after HTML! Both are descendants of SGML.
More precisely, both are flavors of XML.
technically HTML is not XML… XHTML is, but HTML can be invalid XML.
Ok—to the extent that SVG is HTML, the variant of HTML that it is is a flavor of XML.
It annoys me that you aren’t supposed to close input tags. At least browsers tolerate self closing them even if it is out of spec.
HTML predates XML by several years.
Age doesn’t matter. XML is a super-set of XHTML’s spec.
That is - all XHTML is valid XML but not all XML is valid XHTML.
Note I’m saying XHTML not HTML since the later need not be valid XML.
No
No what?
Ommigod, these kids :)
SVG comes XML (a more coherent/simple version of the SGML that is behind HTML), and specifically from a time where people took XML and made it hyper-complicated with a flurry of extensions and specifications (look up “xml namespaces” “xslt” “xml schema”).
The most apparent difference between SGML and XML is than in the former you write tags like <br> without a corresponding </br>, and in the latter you have to close them like <br/> (which is shorthand for <br></br>).
So… today you learned that what you learned earlier today was close to truth, but not true :)
PS: A lot of document formats are undercover/zipped XML (eg. the libre office documents, IIRC microsoft’s .xlsx and .docx). This is not dissimilar to how json/yaml are widely used today.
for example, on a linux distro, we could modify the desktop environment and make it waaaaay lighter by getting rid of jpg or png icons and just using pure svg on it.
this has largely happened; if you’re on a dpkg-based distro try running this command:
dpkg -S svg | grep svg$ | sort…and you’ll see that your distro includes thousands of SVG files :)
explanation of that pipeline:
dpkg -S svg- this searches for files installed by the package manager which contain “svg” in their pathgrep svg$- this filters the output to only show paths which end with svg; that is, the actual svg files. the argument to grep is a regular expression, wheremeans “end of line”. you can invert the match (to see the pathsdpkg -S svgfound which only contain “svg” in the middle of the path) by writinggrep -v svg$instead.- the
sortcommand does what it says on the tin, and makes the output easier to read
you can run
man dpkg,man grep, andman sortto read more about each of these commands.Is this the same as
pacman -Ql?Edit: the dpkg part is.
Another interesting part is that HTML5 supports embedding SVG. That is, you can put SVG code directly in your HTML5 document and it’s going to render correctly. You can also style it through your website’s CSS file and manipulate the elements via JavaScript.
Though as others pointed out, it’s technically not HTML but XML. For example, you have to close all the elements and quote all the attribute values. But when you embed it inside a HTML document, those rules get relaxed to adhere with HTML. (I.e., you cannot write
<circle r=5>in SVG (it must be<circle r="5" />) but you can when you embed it in HTML).woww that is crazy, thanks, does that mean that instead of using exported pngs, i can just use the svg code on html and it’ll be a much lighter file??
litghter, as in smaller, yess. but keep in mind, that vector graphics need to be rendered, wich depending on circumstance and graphic might become inefficient.
i never crunched the numbers, but basically youre outsourcing the generation of a rastergraphic to those who open up your website.
Though this also has advantages - not only will they be drawn at an appropriate resolution, they can also be styled & modified by the user. If I’m using Dark Reader and your icons are SVGs using
currentColor, they’ll render with the same color as other text. The best you can do for raster graphics is inverting them.i too love the svg. rest assured. ;)
