I have been using SVGs for charts on my blog for a couple of months[0] now. Using SVGs satisfied me, but in all honesty, I don't think anyone else cares. For completeness the benefits are below:
* The charts are never blurry
* The text in the chart is selectable and searchable
* The file size could be small compared to PNGs
* The charts can use a font set by a stylesheet
* The charts can have a builtin dark mode (not demonstrated on my blog)
Additionally as the OP shown, the text in SVG is indexed by google, but comes up in the image sections [1].
The downside was hours of fiddling with system fonts and webfonts and font settings in matplotlib. Also the sizing of the text in the chart and how it is displayed in your page is tightly coupled and requires some forethought.
That's totally correct! I once replaced some blurry scans from the 6502 manual by SVG versions, and, while I was at it, I coded them by hand (really, because for this particular job it seemed easier than doing it in a drawing program.) While nobody will notice, it's satisfactory.
Another thing to watch out for with SVGs is how they appear in RSS readers or browser reader views. If you're using external SVG files then it should be fine. If you've optimized them by embedding into the HTML, then you need to be careful. If they rely on CSS rules in the page's CSS then it's not going to work well. For my website I try to make the SVGs self-sufficient by setting the viewBox, width, and height attributes, using a web safe font, and only relying on internal styles. You can still get some measure of light/dark mode support by setting fill or stroke to currentColor.
It does come up in normal results for me, I don't need to go to the images section, the page has keyword for testing lmtbk4mh, see result https://www.google.com/search?q=lmtbk4mh
To complete the test, the website needs an HTML page that is mostly SVG. I think that might stand a chance of getting into the main search results rather than just the image search.
Also of interest for me would be whether SVG description markup gets picked up in the index.
To complete the search of possibilities, having the SVG generated by Javascript on page load would be of interest, for example, with some JSON object of data that then gets parsed to plot some SVG images.
Your SVG graphs are very neat and nobody caring is a feature not a bug. If they were blurry PNGs then people might notice but nobody notices 'perfection', just defects.
I noticed you were using 'NASA numbers' in your SVGs. Six decimal places for each point on a path is a level of precision that you can cut down with SVGOMG or using the export features from Inkscape. I like to go for integers when possible in SVG.
The thing with SVG is that the levels of optimisation go on forever. For example, I would set the viewbox coordinates so that (0, 0) is where the graph starts. Nobody would ever notice or care about that, but it would be something I would have to do.
Oh man, this is a deep mine to dig. I haven't even thought about svg size optimization. The default blog template I used really wants me to use hero images, and the jpgs are already hefty. I just looked at my network panel, and it seems the font files are loaded once per svg on initial load and then are cached.
What is the motivation for viewbox coordinates being at (0,0)? I have been thinking about setting chart gutters so that the graph is left aligned with the text, but this seems like an orthogonal issue.
A few years back I updated my site[1] so all of the UI graphics (e.g., logos, icons in the menus) are SVG sprites baked into the HTML. It resulted in a lot fewer requests per page, lower overall page size, and sharp navigation on any device at any resolution. It works great, though it was a lot of initial work to get it working.
Text selection is a little unintuitive (iOS on iPhone) If I’m not directly over the text I get a little magnified bubble instead. On plain HTML text selection is a little more forgiving if your long presses are not accurate.
Just serving a whole SVG file directly never even crossed my mind as an option, very cool.
A while back I used a giant interactive SVG as the UI for a site I was prototyping, albeit wrapped in a normal HTML page. It was easy to set up and worked reasonably well, but I found that in Firefox performance started to degrade beyond a few thousand elements and so converted everything (except some accessibility features) to use a canvas instead. (The core of the old version is still deployed here if you want to see how far you can push it: https://freeclimbs.org/wall/demo/edit-set )
Yeah this is a big part of the reason SVGs are dangerous if treated like normal image files. They are basically equivalent to HTML w/ embedded CSS and can even execute javascript.
If you aren't careful they can be used for XSS and all kinds of nasty stuff.
They are also super useful in general though despite that.
There were some tools that let you do a lot of flash-type things using html5 and svg. I used Tumult Hype for an animation project a few years ago, but I don't think it ever became as popular as Flash.
Svgs are capable of anything. You can draw anything with it as it’s just a format for vector graphics. The vectors can be manipulated so you can even make a 3D game engine from it if you wanted.
The only thing that separates it from html and css is that html and css biases towards website styled stuff. HTML is designed for text boxes and that kind of stuff while svgs bias more towards a neutral drawing medium: shapes and vectors.
So because it’s more neutral you can even make a html engine from svg if you so wanted.
I realize it's far from a best practice and even explicitly stated as a bad idea somewhere in the SVG spec, but the idea of a document editor where you can individually position each and every character and make detailed, individual glyphs natively without loading fonts is interesting to me.
Are there any examples of this? Or perhaps different (better) approaches to a document editor with the advantages I said above?
SVGs are under explored in generative AI. They are effectively a graphics language of their own. LLMs can write them directly without a vision architecture, and understand them in ways that non-vector graphics cannot.
One thing I love about SVGs for websites is their stability across many contexts, browsers, etc. Everything is pinpoint, coordinate based, nothing moves around unexpectedly. You define it once, it's done.
Viewed it on iPhone in the passenger seat of my son’s 79 Thunderbird. Doesn’t reflow and is a disaster in portrait but I pinch zoomed it in landscape and it was readable.
I do not observe any performance problem in Firefox (Nightly, Linux/Sway), and I’d say text selection is very good, with these caveats:
• Caret mode (F7) doesn’t work at all.
• Triple click selects all the text on the page, rather than just that of a single <text> element as I’d have expected (in which model you’d use <text> for a paragraph and <tspan> for its lines, and thus get the normal triple-click behaviour).
• Click and drag on a text link starts selection or drags the already-selected text, rather than dragging the link so you can drop it in a new tab or such. And if you mouse up on the same link (regardless of having left it), it activates.
• If you start a selection, it is only updated while you’re moving over text. Drag past the end of the line, then down, and it should select more text, but it only actually will when you move back over text.
• If text is selected, clicking outside text doesn’t clear the selection. (Probably the same root cause.)
• Shift+Up and Shift+Down select to the start or end of the containing <text> element, rather than operating linewise. (Because there’s no such thing logically, it’d require heuristic work. Or for people to implement flowed text, like Inkscape did but sadly then it was pulled out of the spec for some reason.)
There are also a couple of issues specific to this document:
• Document order is not sensible. For example, it goes title, then side nav title, then footer, then body text, then “Home”, then side nav contents, then magic keyword. But this does show a broader problem: in HTML it’s not the easiest to get stupid document ordering (possible, but you have to go a little out of your way), but in SVG it will happen unless you’re careful.
• Also likely to happen unless you’re careful: multiline text sometimes lacks the trailing spaces necessary to separate words once the line break is ignored (since there’s no such thing as a line break in SVG 1.1, only a shifted cursor position). For example, “Inkscapefor” fails, whereas “willing to” succeeds.
—⁂—
Chromium is interesting. Supports caret browsing (+), Up/Down do something weird (−), triple click only selects that <text> element (+), you can’t start a text selection in a link (±), but you can’t drag the link either (=), and while selecting, any time the pointer is not over text, it’ll shift that selection boundary to something like the start of the document (−), except it’s not actually the start because it excludes the title text for some reason.
I think that's just the standard behavior of the selection algorithm with that particular layout. FF might be applying some kind of debouncing or hysteresis to keep it from flickering, but if so it's making all selection sluggish.
Selectable and more importantly searchable text is one of the reasons why I occasionally open Large SVG diagrams in browser instead of the usual image viewer.
I’ve done some cool things with the built-in SMIL animation too. You can control it with JavaScript and CSS… Watch out for the filters though — they can be pretty heavy compute-wise.
The search term lmtbk4mh is found with Brave Search (3 hits so far, but it cannot provide a description of the SVG site). DuckDuckGo Search has zero results at this moment.
The page is old enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if Google and Bing used to index it and are capable of indexing it, but no longer do. A lot of older stuff where you know exactly what’s there just can’t be found any more.
Flash did not disappear because of an unfortunate accident. It disappeared because Adobe was unwilling to fix its outdated system and rampant security flaws.
I did wonder why they didn't just switch out actionscript for js and use plain html/svg/canvas. I'm kind of glad they didn't but I think there would have been money in doing so.
Actually they did, Adobe still makes the Flash authoring tool but they call it Animate, it exports files that work with an HTML/JS player that does almost everything Flash did.
Unity also has a very good pipeline for building webgl targets. You can virtually ignore the platform concern until the very end, as long as you aren't being ridiculous with real time lighting and texture resolution.
I have used an LLM to write code in web servers to generate data plots using SVG embedded directly in web pages. This bypasses the need for PNG generation, Javascript for rendering a plot, and also the need for a plotting library. You can see two examples in the gist d29164051477ce1b2b95b788297a1932.
Though Stylus Labs’ site is not pure SVG, but a collection of SVGs embedded in an HTML container, which makes life quite a bit easier (applying a page background and embedding a video iframe are easier, and proper sizing and centring the column is not otherwise possible without scripting).
I have been using SVGs for charts on my blog for a couple of months[0] now. Using SVGs satisfied me, but in all honesty, I don't think anyone else cares. For completeness the benefits are below:
* The charts are never blurry
* The text in the chart is selectable and searchable
* The file size could be small compared to PNGs
* The charts can use a font set by a stylesheet
* The charts can have a builtin dark mode (not demonstrated on my blog)
Additionally as the OP shown, the text in SVG is indexed by google, but comes up in the image sections [1].
The downside was hours of fiddling with system fonts and webfonts and font settings in matplotlib. Also the sizing of the text in the chart and how it is displayed in your page is tightly coupled and requires some forethought.
[0] https://aleyan.com/blog/2025-llm-assistant-census
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22slabiciunea+lui+Nicu+fore...
Chartist is an amazing JS include that is tiny (10kb), that makes it super simple to create beautiful SVG charts.
It’s way undervalued and rarely gets updates.
https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/
That's the kind of thing you do not for the users but because of your own standards, and even if no one else appreciates it, you always do.
That's totally correct! I once replaced some blurry scans from the 6502 manual by SVG versions, and, while I was at it, I coded them by hand (really, because for this particular job it seemed easier than doing it in a drawing program.) While nobody will notice, it's satisfactory.
[1] https://www.masswerk.at/6502/6502_instruction_set.html#stack
Another thing to watch out for with SVGs is how they appear in RSS readers or browser reader views. If you're using external SVG files then it should be fine. If you've optimized them by embedding into the HTML, then you need to be careful. If they rely on CSS rules in the page's CSS then it's not going to work well. For my website I try to make the SVGs self-sufficient by setting the viewBox, width, and height attributes, using a web safe font, and only relying on internal styles. You can still get some measure of light/dark mode support by setting fill or stroke to currentColor.
They appear to have “solved” the RSS problem by only providing one sentence of content with each entry in the RSS feed.
It does come up in normal results for me, I don't need to go to the images section, the page has keyword for testing lmtbk4mh, see result https://www.google.com/search?q=lmtbk4mh
What are you using to produce the graphs?
I wrote a small graphing library for mine [1], but it has limitations.
[1] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/sound-source-delta.html
To complete the test, the website needs an HTML page that is mostly SVG. I think that might stand a chance of getting into the main search results rather than just the image search.
Also of interest for me would be whether SVG description markup gets picked up in the index.
To complete the search of possibilities, having the SVG generated by Javascript on page load would be of interest, for example, with some JSON object of data that then gets parsed to plot some SVG images.
Your SVG graphs are very neat and nobody caring is a feature not a bug. If they were blurry PNGs then people might notice but nobody notices 'perfection', just defects.
I noticed you were using 'NASA numbers' in your SVGs. Six decimal places for each point on a path is a level of precision that you can cut down with SVGOMG or using the export features from Inkscape. I like to go for integers when possible in SVG.
The thing with SVG is that the levels of optimisation go on forever. For example, I would set the viewbox coordinates so that (0, 0) is where the graph starts. Nobody would ever notice or care about that, but it would be something I would have to do.
Oh man, this is a deep mine to dig. I haven't even thought about svg size optimization. The default blog template I used really wants me to use hero images, and the jpgs are already hefty. I just looked at my network panel, and it seems the font files are loaded once per svg on initial load and then are cached.
What is the motivation for viewbox coordinates being at (0,0)? I have been thinking about setting chart gutters so that the graph is left aligned with the text, but this seems like an orthogonal issue.
Yes! We do that with svija.com/en — an all SVG website with an HYML wrapper so it displays at the correct size.
A few years back I updated my site[1] so all of the UI graphics (e.g., logos, icons in the menus) are SVG sprites baked into the HTML. It resulted in a lot fewer requests per page, lower overall page size, and sharp navigation on any device at any resolution. It works great, though it was a lot of initial work to get it working.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com
I love damninteresting. Thanks for keeping it going for the last two decades.
The hamburger button animation is so buttery smooth
its CSS
Apart from using SVG the design of that page has that vintage 2000s feel... don't know why but I love it
If you want that 2000s feel for your own sites: Gradient background, drop shadows, and side bar nav.
It's from 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070730042618/http://svg.nicubu...
The reference to Firefox 3.0 probably helps with the vintage feel.
A "best viewed in" box would have been hilarious.
We have been building all-SVG websites for six years – https:/svija.com/en
They do get indexed by Google, and we take some extra steps to ensure usability.
Anyone have knowledge on how accessible SVGs are for folks who use assistive technologies?
I wasn't even able to copy the text that was intended for search engines, so I guess it is not accessible
Copy paste and pinch zoom work fine for me in iOS. Maybe switch to a better browser?
Text selection is a little unintuitive (iOS on iPhone) If I’m not directly over the text I get a little magnified bubble instead. On plain HTML text selection is a little more forgiving if your long presses are not accurate.
On chrome/android
Just serving a whole SVG file directly never even crossed my mind as an option, very cool.
A while back I used a giant interactive SVG as the UI for a site I was prototyping, albeit wrapped in a normal HTML page. It was easy to set up and worked reasonably well, but I found that in Firefox performance started to degrade beyond a few thousand elements and so converted everything (except some accessibility features) to use a canvas instead. (The core of the old version is still deployed here if you want to see how far you can push it: https://freeclimbs.org/wall/demo/edit-set )
See svija.com/en — all SVG websites ;-)
Wow, I didn't know SVG was capable of that, the website looks like a HTML/CSS site from the 2000s, but it's still cool.
Yeah this is a big part of the reason SVGs are dangerous if treated like normal image files. They are basically equivalent to HTML w/ embedded CSS and can even execute javascript.
If you aren't careful they can be used for XSS and all kinds of nasty stuff.
They are also super useful in general though despite that.
There were some tools that let you do a lot of flash-type things using html5 and svg. I used Tumult Hype for an animation project a few years ago, but I don't think it ever became as popular as Flash.
Now right click it and view source. SVG is just markup, same as HTML.
Like, this SVG is just a Website! Props to the creator, loving this.
Svgs are capable of anything. You can draw anything with it as it’s just a format for vector graphics. The vectors can be manipulated so you can even make a 3D game engine from it if you wanted.
The only thing that separates it from html and css is that html and css biases towards website styled stuff. HTML is designed for text boxes and that kind of stuff while svgs bias more towards a neutral drawing medium: shapes and vectors.
So because it’s more neutral you can even make a html engine from svg if you so wanted.
Has anyone ever built a document editor with SVG?
I realize it's far from a best practice and even explicitly stated as a bad idea somewhere in the SVG spec, but the idea of a document editor where you can individually position each and every character and make detailed, individual glyphs natively without loading fonts is interesting to me.
Are there any examples of this? Or perhaps different (better) approaches to a document editor with the advantages I said above?
SVGs are under explored in generative AI. They are effectively a graphics language of their own. LLMs can write them directly without a vision architecture, and understand them in ways that non-vector graphics cannot.
One thing I love about SVGs for websites is their stability across many contexts, browsers, etc. Everything is pinpoint, coordinate based, nothing moves around unexpectedly. You define it once, it's done.
If this is the goal, a PDF website could be even better.
Viewed it on iPhone in the passenger seat of my son’s 79 Thunderbird. Doesn’t reflow and is a disaster in portrait but I pinch zoomed it in landscape and it was readable.
Text selection is sluggish and wonky in Firefox. A bit flickery in Chrome and Safari, but otherwise behaves fine.
I do not observe any performance problem in Firefox (Nightly, Linux/Sway), and I’d say text selection is very good, with these caveats:
• Caret mode (F7) doesn’t work at all.
• Triple click selects all the text on the page, rather than just that of a single <text> element as I’d have expected (in which model you’d use <text> for a paragraph and <tspan> for its lines, and thus get the normal triple-click behaviour).
• Click and drag on a text link starts selection or drags the already-selected text, rather than dragging the link so you can drop it in a new tab or such. And if you mouse up on the same link (regardless of having left it), it activates.
• If you start a selection, it is only updated while you’re moving over text. Drag past the end of the line, then down, and it should select more text, but it only actually will when you move back over text.
• If text is selected, clicking outside text doesn’t clear the selection. (Probably the same root cause.)
• Shift+Up and Shift+Down select to the start or end of the containing <text> element, rather than operating linewise. (Because there’s no such thing logically, it’d require heuristic work. Or for people to implement flowed text, like Inkscape did but sadly then it was pulled out of the spec for some reason.)
There are also a couple of issues specific to this document:
• Document order is not sensible. For example, it goes title, then side nav title, then footer, then body text, then “Home”, then side nav contents, then magic keyword. But this does show a broader problem: in HTML it’s not the easiest to get stupid document ordering (possible, but you have to go a little out of your way), but in SVG it will happen unless you’re careful.
• Also likely to happen unless you’re careful: multiline text sometimes lacks the trailing spaces necessary to separate words once the line break is ignored (since there’s no such thing as a line break in SVG 1.1, only a shifted cursor position). For example, “Inkscapefor” fails, whereas “willing to” succeeds.
—⁂—
Chromium is interesting. Supports caret browsing (+), Up/Down do something weird (−), triple click only selects that <text> element (+), you can’t start a text selection in a link (±), but you can’t drag the link either (=), and while selecting, any time the pointer is not over text, it’ll shift that selection boundary to something like the start of the document (−), except it’s not actually the start because it excludes the title text for some reason.
My experience in a chromium-based browser was multiline text selection was not good.
Any time you drag over space between lines, it selects something else.
I think that's just the standard behavior of the selection algorithm with that particular layout. FF might be applying some kind of debouncing or hysteresis to keep it from flickering, but if so it's making all selection sluggish.
Yes, unfortunately SVG does not support line breaks or wrapping, so much like pdf text selection is on a best effort basis
FF142 macOS had no issues with text selection on my end.
Yet another example of how maddening it still is when designing websites that have the same experience regardless of how it is viewed.
It's interesting that SVGs can include selectable text. Nice blog.
Selectable and more importantly searchable text is one of the reasons why I occasionally open Large SVG diagrams in browser instead of the usual image viewer.
Right. I'd always just seen SVG as an image format. Interesting that browsers treat text inside them just like plain text.
I’ve done some cool things with the built-in SMIL animation too. You can control it with JavaScript and CSS… Watch out for the filters though — they can be pretty heavy compute-wise.
You can actually embed HTML inside an SVG using the foreignObject element.
I mean, it is just plain text inside some XML tags. It'd be weirder if they treated it like text in a photo
The search term lmtbk4mh is found with Brave Search (3 hits so far, but it cannot provide a description of the SVG site). DuckDuckGo Search has zero results at this moment.
The page is old enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if Google and Bing used to index it and are capable of indexing it, but no longer do. A lot of older stuff where you know exactly what’s there just can’t be found any more.
https://www.google.com/search?q=svg.nicubunu.ro seems to surface it, with text; https://www.google.com/search?q=site:svg.nicubunu.ro gets the title, but no more text. I’m curious how it decided what the title was. I wonder if they have some kind of “choose the largest text” heuristic if a title is missing.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=svg.nicubunu.ro and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:svg.nicubunu.ro don’t show a result.
I wonder if you copying the term here in HN (with the link to that site) would pollute the benchmark dataset…
Good point. I wonder if that cat is now too far out of the bag for a deletion of my comments to be of help?
I don’t think it’s that big of a problem – you can still see if the results link to the SVG website itself, and ignore everything else.
There's symmetry at this moment in the results from Brave Search and Google Search looking for lmtbk4mh.
When searching for it on DuckDuckGo, the search engine found your comment via a HN frontend while not finding the original site.
Add GSAP DrawSVG (https://gsap.com/docs/v3/Plugins/DrawSVGPlugin/) and you've nearly rebuilt Macromedia Flash!
Ah, reminds me of Flash websites with SEO-indexable text.
At this point just bring back Flash...
It was so nice and unlocked so much creativity among early web developers. unfortunately Apple contributed to its demise
Flash did not disappear because of an unfortunate accident. It disappeared because Adobe was unwilling to fix its outdated system and rampant security flaws.
Jobs, 2010 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/steve-job...
Anyone remember the flash-block plugins to keep browsers from auto rendering malicious flash content?
I did wonder why they didn't just switch out actionscript for js and use plain html/svg/canvas. I'm kind of glad they didn't but I think there would have been money in doing so.
Actually they did, Adobe still makes the Flash authoring tool but they call it Animate, it exports files that work with an HTML/JS player that does almost everything Flash did.
That was news to me!
For the web you can now use Cocos2d-x[1], Godot Engine[2], PixiJS[3], and/or Phaser[4].
[1] https://www.cocos.com/en/cocos2d-x
[2] https://godotengine.org/
[3] https://pixijs.com/
[4] https://phaser.io/
Unity also has a very good pipeline for building webgl targets. You can virtually ignore the platform concern until the very end, as long as you aren't being ridiculous with real time lighting and texture resolution.
Why we would do that when canvas related apis support gpu acceleration?
isn't this basically what flutter does?
(2007)
Svija honed the process of creating SVG websites: https://svija.com/
There are some very nice showcases at the bottom of the page. For example, 2021: https://2021.svija.love/
Previously featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33518845 [Show HN: All-SVG websites with complex animation]
> [ ... ] and instatisfaction [sic] for the users
In-what? Unhappiness with a statistical outcome? Discouragement with events in one's home state?
Based on the many other uncorrected typos in the example SVG, I suspect that Inkscape has everything but a spell checker.
Apropos, Inkscape is a big app and does practically everything.
I have used an LLM to write code in web servers to generate data plots using SVG embedded directly in web pages. This bypasses the need for PNG generation, Javascript for rendering a plot, and also the need for a plotting library. You can see two examples in the gist d29164051477ce1b2b95b788297a1932.
Another SVG website: https://styluslabs.com/
Though Stylus Labs’ site is not pure SVG, but a collection of SVGs embedded in an HTML container, which makes life quite a bit easier (applying a page background and embedding a video iframe are easier, and proper sizing and centring the column is not otherwise possible without scripting).
awful readibility tbh, and not accessible at all I guess