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That SVG does have to be inline though, which drastically increases your HTML page’s size. You cannot style an SVG loaded in an IMG element.

Imagine rendering 50 rows with each 6 icons, 1kb each. There are 6 unique icons, so it’s only 6kb each loading them from the server, but inline you’ll have 300kb of SVG icons




You can use an "SVG sprite" with <use>. No need to inline the SVG every time.


Oh? I have to look that up


Took me a while to figure it all out, but it works surprisingly well. I have been using https://icomoon.io/ to generate the sprites. They also provide a JS polyfill to support IE.


But how do you actually apply the styling? Just add a class to the <use> tag which contains “color:red;” ?


You can export your SVGs with fill="currentColor" and your color attribute onto the SVG tag or its container would work.

Since at $JOB i'm using SVG icons with more than one color, i use fill="var(--svg-color-base)" or fill="var(--svg-color-accent)" so i can precisely set which color i want, in a perfectly scope-able manner.

The greatest advantage is that you can reference externally your svg with xlink.href on top of your website: you have to make one more request, but it's cacheable. Pick your tradeoff :)


You're saying you can embed all the SVGs onto one page, and then reference them on other pages/domains by using xlink.href? I haven't heard of this?

So what you're describing is having site.com/page1 which has markup: <body> <svg id="icon-1"> ... </svg> </body>

and then on site.com/page2 having

<body> <svg> <use href="/page1#icon-1"> </svg> </body>

Or something of this manner? Haven't encountered this, but sounds awesome; especially since you'd get the power of both inlining and caching the asset.


This should work as long as the SVG shapes have the "fill" and/or "stroke" set to "currentColor".


Either fill: currentColor or fill: var(--iconColor, currentColor) should do the trick. I prefer the 2nd one because it lets me change iconColor whenever I find it appropiate


You can also use Boxy SVG to create and edit SVG sprites: https://boxy-svg.com/#tour-symbols


Boxy says "15 day free trial" but there's no information about how much it costs.

Dora anyone know? I'm not going to sign up for something without knowing what I'm getting into.


Linux desktop app is free, macOS desktop app costs 9.99 USD (one-time payment), web app costs 9.99 USD / year (no cloud services) or 9.99 USD / month (with cloud services). The complete pricing table is shown in the footer area of the home page when you open it with a Chromium-based browser.


> when you open it with a Chromium-based browser

Looks like they're using the experimental CSSStyleSheet() constructor [1] to display the pricing table. Ugh.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CSSStyleShe...


Someone has to push us to the future! Why wouldn't a business be happy to exclude 30% of browsers?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/construct-style-sheets-polyfil...


We are using this at GitLab: https://gitlab-org.gitlab.io/gitlab-svgs/, using svg-sprite to build the sprite file: https://www.npmjs.com/package/svg-sprite


compared to the massive Js CSS and Images included on almost all 99.9% of pages a bit of SVG is trivial.


Everything's a bit in isolation, that's how they get ya. Easily to bulk up, hard to trim back down.


sigh tell me about it


1kb is a lot for a simple svg icon.

That said, if you have a single page app already, you can render as many icons as you want, since you’ll only download them once anyway.


But if you want 5 icons, 5K of SVG beats 55K of WOFF.


I wonder how React copes with a whole bunch of inline SVGs. Seems expensive


Copes totally fine and it's trivial to memoise them anyway.


Most icons are generally tiny. Millage will vary, but they can speed up your site. Fewer requests for a slightly large page size.




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