Serve SVG as an Image on Apache with .htaccess

By  on  

I've been a massive fan of SVG since my days creating charts and animations with the Dojo Toolkit.  SVG has been around forever, it even has IE support now, and it's ultra-flexible.  When creating this site's redesign, I used SVG within an IMG tag and it work great locally.  When I pushed to the live server, however, the image displayed as broken and I saw the following notice in the console:

Resource interpreted as Image but transferred with MIME type text/xml: "https://davidwalsh.name/logo.svg".

That was certainly unexpected.  Obviously there was a difference in my local server and my production server, so after a bit of research, I found that the following .htaccess update would resolve the issue:

AddType image/svg+xml svg svgz
AddEncoding gzip svgz

Serving SVG as XML, what it essentially is, really isn't of use to me -- I want to use it in its visual glory.  Keep this snippet handy in case you also run into this issue!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Simple Image Lazy Load and Fade

    One of the quickest and easiest website performance optimizations is decreasing image loading.  That means a variety of things, including minifying images with tools like ImageOptim and TinyPNG, using data URIs and sprites, and lazy loading images.  It's a bit jarring when you're lazy loading images and they just...

  • By
    Create a Sexy Persistent Header with Opacity Using MooTools or jQuery

    I've been working with the Magento eCommerce solution a lot lately and I've taken a liking to a technique they use with the top bar within their administrative control panel. When the user scrolls below a specified threshold, the top bar becomes attached to the...

Discussion

  1. Nice, I always missed that one. But isn’t it better to user dots before the file endings? In the original documentation for AddType the example says so.

    AddType image/svg+xml .svg .svgz
    
  2. With which MIME type will it be transferred after adding this configuration?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!