GitHub badges in SVG format

[mathiasbynens]

A lot of GitHub repositories have badges like these in their README:

There are several services that can be used to serve these badge images based on some URL parameters, e.g. shields.io (repo).

Currently these badges are all bitmaps (usually in JPG or PNG format). It would be nice to have them in SVG format, for the following reasons:

• vector images still look nice on high-resolution displays
• hackability; creating a badge with different colors or text is just a matter of editing the SVG file in a text editor
• likely, bandwidth savings (for the services that serve these badge images and for end users)

TODO

• Remake these images as a static example SVG file
• Convince an existing badge service to serve SVG responses instead of the bitmaps they’re sending out now (optionally based on a new URL parameter)

Any SVG gurus/ninjas/unicorns out there that want to give the first task a try?

[bordoni]

WoW! Loved the idea. 👍

[kulturbande]

a big 👍

[stefanjudis]

👍

[fhemberger]

@mathiasbynens Have you seen this repo?
https://github.com/hughsk/stability-badges

[mathiasbynens]

@fhemberger Awesome! It looks like the generated code in that repo could be improved/cleaned up a little bit, but other than that it looks like the first task on the TODO list is as good as finished :)

[espadrine]

Tried something quick here: https://thefiletree.com/gh-badges/build-passed.svg

However, in stable Firefox, letter-spacing doesn't seem to work.

[sindresorhus]

👍

Relevant: badges/shields#80

[espadrine]

I think I have something competitive here: [gist] https://gist.github.com/espadrine/8218740
(Not just my work, not sure who helped, hope everyone is ok with making this CC0.)

Fork this gist to add images!

[espadrine]

Quick size comparison:

File	Size (bytes)
build-passed.png	1842
build-passed.svg	1018
build-passed.svgz	381

[mathiasbynens]

@espadrine Nice! (I was the one who helped a little bit, but really you really did all the hard work :))

How about setting up a repository for this instead of a gist? Would make it a better place to point to, as we could add documentation for badge services (i.e. how to change width attributes based on the length of the input string on the back-end), etc.

[s10wen]

Any reason these couldn't simply be HTML / CSS?

[mathiasbynens]

@simonowendesign Because <img src=badge.html> doesn’t work (assuming badge.html really is an HTML document).

[mathiasbynens]

@espadrine created a repo for the SVG badge boilerplate/template: https://github.com/espadrine/gh-badges

Feedback and improvements on the code are welcome there!

[s10wen]

I get that if an image tag has been previously used SVG would be the right way to go, but wondering if an imageless alternative would be beneficial as well going forward?

[mathiasbynens]

@simonowendesign <iframe>s are not supported by GitHub Markdown.

[philippbosch]

@simonowendesign Everything but an image makes embedding in Markdown or reStructuredText (that's what most READMEs on Github are written in) unnecessarily complicated. Images can be embedded like this in Markdown:

![Travis CI](http://img.shields.io/travis-ci/rails/rails.png)

"imageless" would mean adding HTML and CSS to a Markdown document which is ugly. Or using <iframe>s – even uglier.

[mathiasbynens]

"imageless" would mean adding HTML and CSS to a Markdown document which is ugly.

Not just ugly, but (more importantly) it would also mean that the content wouldn’t be dynamic anymore.

[s10wen]

Gotcha, and guess something like a button styling for Markdown would be overkill?

[mathiasbynens]

Definitely :) Also it would have the same issue: in this case, the content must come from a third party server (not from the README source itself).

[mathiasbynens]

Good news! This is now pretty much solved by http://gh-badges.herokuapp.com/ (repo: https://github.com/espadrine/gh-badges).

There are just a few annoying browser bugs in the way of using these beautiful SVG badges: badges/gh-badges#5

[chadwhitacre]

Cross-post from badges/shields#80 (comment) :

Okay, so we have http://shields.io/, http://badgr.co/, and now http://b.adge.me/ all doing basically the same thing. We've already got http://badgr.co/ well on it's way to being folded into http://shields.io/. I think it's in the best interest of the open source community as a whole to do the same with http://b.adge.me/. In other words, we should add SVG support to http://shields.io/.

[hhfrancois]

Hi, thank for the service.
your service Have it a max delivery ?
Cause with 7 badges in my site, I have an error.

[espadrine]

@hhfrancois Thanks for telling us! We hope we fixed it. Tell us if it works better.

As a side-node, it may be unstable this week, but will be better next week.

[hhfrancois]

@espadrine Thank for the response.

[svoop]

@espadrine I don't find a better place to ask this: How about adding beerpay.io as well?

[espadrine]

@svoop Don't hesitate to create an issue on the project!

[calidion]

hi, all
the service is very unstable.

i can easily get unresponsive state.
can this be improved?

[niksmac]

here from here

[cbanowsky]

the custom badges are fun if nothing else:

[Llewellynvdm]

The downloads badges:

• 
• 
• 
• 

Not working for the last few weeks.