Is SVG practical for very complex illustrations on the web?

Question

I am working on a web application that uses quite a few large complex images for the background and front illustrations. I tend to use SVG instead of bitmap graphics because of its scalability and the dynamic interactions that it allows. But some of the large images are very complex (several thousand paths drawn in Inkscape).

How practical will it be (in terms of performance) to use SVG images of this size? Will this make my page much slower than if I used PNG images? Are there specific methods (for example, one implementation approach over another) that will make a difference for loading and rendering?

Answer 1

You can simplify the path data to fit the size of your viewport. Some invisible elements should not be output to the DOM tree. Google map also uses SVG and works very well.