On Tuesday 16 September 2008 17:30:56 Jared Williams wrote:
-----Original
Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Nikola Smolenski
Sent: 16 September 2008 15:35
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] SVG conversion options -- rsvg vs Inkscape?
Philosophically, it shouldn't be done. Someone might want to
print a Wikipedia article on a building, and the 500K flag
would then look just right.
Pragmatically, if you don't care about printing articles on
buildings and are ready to lossily compress SVGs, there is no
particular need to use SVG when PNG will do.
Otherwise, the idea of lossily compressing SVGs is very
interesting, and I believe it could be done :)
Not sure. Obviously working out the most effiecient stylesheet for a given
svg, removing repeated style attributes would be one area. But might effect
the editability of the image. It could be like trying to edit a minified
javascript file.
If that's what you had in mind, that's possible, but the gains would probably
not be very big. Note also that we don't minify javascript files, compress
HTML or anything similar.
Producing a smaller SVG thumbnail of a SVG image would
definitely be
possible. Looking at Flag_of_Mexico, almost all the coordinates have
several decimal places, so could reduce the accurancy of those in a smaller
image without loosing anything.
Just did it. The file got almost twice smaller (more than twice when I removed
unnecessary spaces), the gzipped file got almost thrice smaller (than the
gzipped original), and the differences are barely noticeable. I'm still not
sure if we should do it.