On Tuesday 16 September 2008 17:30:56 Jared Williams wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@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.