How does Safari determine what size to output an svg in the following scenario;
SVG code
viewBox 0 0 800 800
height 100%
width 100%
css
svg width 100%
containing div width 60%
Safari outputs a much smaller svg than the 60% of screen, ok this is a bug. But what determines the size of this smaller svg, it has no connection to anything I can think of.
Just to give some background info. Safari needs both width and height in px for it to do what you want. % don-t work. But it does output the svg, and so it must make a decision somewhere about its size.
It's not a bug you're seeing. That's the correct behavior. The browser by default scales the SVG viewbox (careful with the terminology now, we're not talking about the browser viewport) to fill the CSS-determined dimensions of the SVG element. The fill behavior is determined by the SVG preserveAspectRatio attribute. By default it's set to meet, which keeps the whole SVG viewable, and the aspect ratio preserved. The alternative is slice which scales the viewbox up to cover the element, even when that means cropping. (slice behaves similarly to background-size:cover in CSS3.)
What you need to do is:
a) Don't declare explicit height or width in the SVG file. If your graphics editor is generating them, just go in by hand and delete them. According to the spec, if no width and height are specified, a value of 100% is assumed, so your pseudocode is redundant at best.
b) Make sure you're setting an explicit height for the svg element in CSS. I recommend developer or Canary builds of Chrome for troubleshooting responsive svg sizing, as there is a bug in Chrome 18 Dev Tools that has since been fixed. Once you've got it working in Chrome, it will almost certainly also work in Safari.
c) Figure out how you want to set preserveAspectRatio and manually edit the svg to put in the declaration.
If you're still having trouble, please post a jsfiddle. It's much easier for other people to comment on.
