I've been complaining lately about how our practice of running SVGs for the mobile interface through SVGO to minimize them causes lots of problems:

* Stripping the XML declaration breaks rendering in some browsers

* Stripping all the whitespace makes them very difficult to edit by hand (which I commonly do to tweak colors or bounding boxes)

* Removing all the IDs makes them harder to edit in graphics programs that use the IDs to label objects and/or groups.

* Collapsing all the groups also makes them harder to edit in graphics programs.

It turns out that a lot of SVGO's behavior is configurable from the command-line. In order to minimize the issues listed above, I would like to propose that we start running SVGO with the following options within MobileFrontend:

svgo file.svg --pretty --disable=removeXMLProcInst --disable=cleanupIDs --disable=collapseGroups

Here are some comparisons of compression size:

Simple SVG (8.8 KiB):

With options: 48.1% reduction

Without options: 55.5% reduction

Complex SVG (636 KiB):
With options: 31.1% reduction
Without options: 36.7% reduction

As you can see, adding the options above doesn't have a large effect on compression efficiency. They do, however, allow our SVG files to retain a lot of legitimately useful information.

Ryan Kaldari