Decoded Chats – fourth edition featuring Sarah Drasner on SVG

At SmashingConf Freiburg I took some time to interview Sarah Drasner on SVG.

In this interview we covered what SVG can bring, how to use it sensibly and what pitfalls to avoid.

You can see the video and get the audio recording of our chat over at the Decoded blog:

Sarah is a dear friend and a lovely person and knows a lot about animation and SVG.

Here are the questions we covered:

1. SVG used to be a major “this is the future of the web” and then it vanished for a while. What is the reason of the new interest in a format that old?
2. Tooling in SVG seems to be still lagging behind in what Flash gave us. Are there any good tools that have – for example – a full animation timeline?
3. SVG syntax on first glance seems rather complex due to its XML format and lots of shortcut notations. Or is it just a matter of getting used to it?
4. Coordinate systems seem to be easy to understand, however when it comes to dynamic coordinate systems and vector basics people get lost much easier. When you teach, is this an issue?
5. What about prejudices towards SVG? It is rumoured to be slow and very memory intense. Is this true?
6. Presets of tools seem to result in really large SVG files which is why we need extra tools to optimise them. Is this improving with the new-found interest in SVG?
7. There seems to be a “war of animation tools”. You can use SVG, CSS Animations, The Web Animation API, or JavaScript libraries. What can developer do about this? Should we learn all of them?
8. There are security issues with linking to external SVG files which makes them harder to use than – for example – images. This can be discouraging and scary for implementers, what can we do there?
9. Does SVG live in the uncanny valley between development and design?
10. Is there one thing you’d love people to stop saying about SVG as it is not true but keeps coming up in conversations?