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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

How is that prescient? Standards can get replaced when something better comes along. The question is whether WebP will be compelling enough to overtake what came before. It looks promising at first glance.

If anyone at a browser development company is reading this, vector image formats are more in need of disruption than raster image formats, SVG is versatile but it's bulky, a more compact vector image format would be welcome, especially in the age of responsive design.

That said, some technology standards can stick around far beyond what they should. MP3 is a classic example, there are far better music formats than MP3 (you'd be hard pressed to find a worse one that's still supported), but because of the sheer volume of music in that format, the 'good enough' status, and the limited abilities of some of the hardware players to handle better formats, we're stuck with it. This isn't something we should seek to encourage, but it does happen.

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> a more compact vector image format would be welcome

SWF. It's more than just a vector image format, but it is far better than SVG in terms of both filesize and resources required to render. Too bad for the "Flash hater's stigma" and the direction Adobe took their player after the acquistion... although there are now a few other alternatives including Mozilla's Shumway.

Can you give a size comparison between SWF and SVG (e.g. file size of same image in both formats)?

Something along the lines of HVIF could be a good fit for the web (perhaps less limitations on image ratios): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_Vector_Icon_Format

SWF as an image format also requires a client side runtime be installed. A runtime with spotty cross platform performance and a poor security track record at that. The distaste for Flash is pretty well justified, I'll take the larger and slower SVGs over Flash any day.

There's this: http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/

Also, since Adobe removed the restrictions on creating programs to display Flash content a few years ago, there's nothing stopping others from writing a minimal, image-only SWF plugin.

Why does the absolute filesize of SVG matter? Nearly all web servers will compress it before putting it on the wire.

It's not just the filesize, it's also the rendering speed. I'm not saying SVG is terrible, I'm just pointing out there's probably room for a smaller vector format that's more focused on the needs of modern websites.

SVG is astonishingly concise. Most renderers are remarkably efficiently. It is very gzippable.

Your criticisms are based upon nothing.

Astonishingly concise? SVG is based on XML, I don't think I've ever seen XML and 'astonishingly concise' in the same sentence before, congratulations for being the first. Besides, I've already pointed to another vector format that is far more concise, just by way of example. SVG is versatile, a jack of all trades if you will, but concise it is not.

>SVG is based on XML, I don't think I've ever seen XML and 'astonishingly concise' in the same sentence before, congratulations for being the first.

The rudiments of the vector description is extremely concise. That it is XML is superficially irrelevant, and if you really think the text markers are so important, consider it a highly compressible binary format via GZIP. Ultimately it doesn't matter.

I've never seen any metric that holds SWF as being more efficient than real-world SVG.

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