[aprssig] Comments on this one?

[Steve Dimse]

On Jan 29, 2014, at 12:20 AM, Tom Hayward <esarfl at gmail.com> wrote:

> The point of SVG is to avoid having to send an 1800px image to
> everyone. There's no need to cater to the largest possible screen size
> because the graphic can infinitely scale itself.
> 
I looked into it, and here is a statistic from caniuseit.com


Global user stats:
Support:	       84.10%
Partial support:	0.02%
Total:	               84.12%

So I either have to support two different graphic methods, blow off over 15% of users, or blow off svg. Easy call for me.

And then there is the bandwidth issue. svg means the user renders the fonts on their computer. So I either need to embed the fonts (don’t know the size of svg fonts, but the TrueTypes are about 1.5MB each), or hope the user has installed the right fonts (which means a lot more questions, complaints, and support when it looks ugly. While it sounds wasteful to send a ~ 1800x1200 PNG (2.2 megapixels) for every request, because there is so much repeating solid color they are highly compressed and average only 2.7k each. The cgi to produce them is three times that size! 

I do plan to have an option, and maybe it will be the default, to use 100% of the window size. CSS is the modern way to do it but takes another file. The easier but less elegant way is to create a 100% single cell table and scale the image to fit.

Steve K4HG