CONCLUSION

WE’VE LEARNED A LOT in a short amount of time, my friends. We’ve learned about the virtues of SVG, when it is the appropriate choice, and how we can get it onto our sites. We’ve looked at tools that help you work with it, from elaborate software like Illustrator down to command-line tools like Grunt. We’ve learned about icon systems, fallbacks, and sizing concerns. We’ve considered performance, accessibility, and responsiveness. We’ve learned about some of the design possibilities of SVG, like animation, filters, and masks.

Yet there is so much we didn’t cover. Attributes left out, values unspoken, entire tags unsung. In part, that’s because of this book’s brevity: not only would a 500-page slog through every little detail of SVG make for a dry read, but it would also be a poor substitute for “the internet.” Quite a bit has been written about SVG that you can search for and find, including plenty of articles by yours truly. I even maintain an up-to-date compendium of SVG information that points to the best resources I know of (http://bkaprt.com/psvg/10-01/).

Another reason to have covered only what we did here is that these are the features I use on a daily basis as a front-end developer. A different developer would likely have covered slightly different things.

For instance, SVG is so perfect for charting. I can imagine a whole chapter (or book!) on building charts with SVG. If I needed to build a charting system, I would reach for SVG in a heartbeat. But I haven’t done that myself yet, so I merely touched on it here. And that’s only one thing I could have explored in much greater depth.

I hope that reading this book has shown you a way into SVG and what it looks like to use it. One of my favorite sayings is “Pave the cow paths.” Like, if you’re building a sidewalk, build it where people are already walking. In the web community, this idea has a lot of currency; it means we should standardize things around what developers are already doing.

It doesn’t quite fit for SVG, though: the sidewalks are already there. The foundation is sound, but years of neglect have left a few cracks and a bit of grass growing up over the edges.

By using SVG now, we’re doing ourselves and our users a favor. But we’re also doing the web a favor by forging a new path that browser makers and standards organizations can see and react to, which in turn will help make SVG even stronger.

So pave the cow paths—but also patch the cracks, pull the weeds, and clear some ground for new, hitherto unimagined trails.