15 February 2002

Appendix J: Minimizing SVG File Sizes

This appendix is informative, not normative.

Considerable effort has been made to make SVG file sizes as small as possible while still retaining the benefits of XML and achieving compatibility and leverage with other W3C specifications.

Here are some of the features in SVG that promote small file sizes:

Additionally, HTTP/1.1 allows for compressed data to be passed from server to client, which can result in significant file size reduction. Here are some sample compression results using gzip compression on SVG documents:

Uncompressed
SVG
With gzip
compression
Compression
ratio
12,912 2,463 81%
12,164 2,553 79%
11,613 2,617 77%
18,689 4,077 78%
13,024 2,041 84%

A related issue is progressive rendering. Some SVG viewers will support:

Here are techniques for minimizing SVG file sizes and minimizing the time before the user is able to start interacting with the SVG document fragments: