Even tho it's 8y old, Sarah Drasner's famous "SVG Can Do That?" talk is still eye-opening for many. CSS has matured a ton since then (I'm less sure about SVG per se)... in any case it's HIGHLY recommended.

Slides: https://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do-that

Video: https://youtu.be/ADXX4fmWHbo?si=6YPZkopyEDc8PSte

One fun thing that can be done with SVG files: you can use entities in an inline DTD to define constants to be shared across different places in the file. You can see some great examples of this in the SVGs in David Ellsworth's "Squares in Squares" page [0].

The major browsers have no issues with this, though note that some tools like Inkscape won't parse the DTD nor expand the entities.

[0] https://kingbird.myphotos.cc/packing/squares_in_squares.html

"A Deep Dive Into SVG Path Commands" by Nanda Syahrasyad [0] is really great for understanding how SVG paths are composed. It's from almost 2 years ago now and really opened my eyes to all that SVGs can do and exactly how they're doing it.

[0] https://www.nan.fyi/svg-paths

I worked on a project that did something fun with SVGs like this. It was built with React, and we had a series of still illustrations with an animated element, with its colour controlled by a CMS.

The frontend would basically call an API that would return an SVG image with the right colour assigned and the animation done by hiding and showing svg elements.

You can see an example here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221020133516im_/https://uncrow...

I really miss Macromedia Flash. There wasn't a single tech like Flash and SWF format which flourished with so many indie games and animated movies available without any extra downloads (other than Flash Player). Barier to entry was so low.

Now, take SVG, it has potential to do everything what SWF could. But there is no editor like Flash and scene/object based coding solution like ActionScript. And each browser has own quirks so only simple SVG is guaranteed to be displayed everywhere.