Best Practices for Using Dynamic SVGs in Your Frontend

🔄 How often have you needed to update icons dynamically based on user interaction?

Whether it’s toggling a button state, switching themes, or updating a UI element, dynamically updating icons is a common need in frontend development.

🚫 Naiv…


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Damandeep Singh

🔄 How often have you needed to update icons dynamically based on user interaction?

Whether it's toggling a button state, switching themes, or updating a UI element, dynamically updating icons is a common need in frontend development.

🚫 Naive Approach :- 

const button = document.getElementById('play-toggle');

const onPlay = () => {
  button.innerHTML = `<!-- SVG markup for play icon -->`;
};

const onPause = () => {
  button.innerHTML = `<!-- SVG markup for pause icon -->`;
};

This method uses innerHTML to inject SVGs on each toggle. While this works, it has two major drawbacks:

  1. Security Risk: innerHTML is prone to XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attacks and is generally discouraged for dynamic updates.

  2. Performance Overhead: Even if replaced with appendChild() or similar safer methods, this approach re-renders the entire SVG each time, leading to unnecessary DOM updates.

✅ Efficient & Safe Approach :-

A cleaner, more efficient, and secure solution is to define your SVGs once using <symbol> and reference them dynamically using <use>.

Checkout the code below:-

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" style="display:none">
    <defs>
      <symbol id="vjs-icon-play" viewBox="0 0 512 512">
        <path fill="currentColor" d="M108.9 66.5v353L403 242.1zm25.3 49.1 212.3 126.7-212.3 128z"></path>
      </symbol>
      <symbol id="vjs-icon-pause" viewBox="0 0 512 512">
        <path fill="currentColor" d="M98.2 422.5h121.6v-359H98.2zm20.4-  338.7h80.8v318.4h-80.8zm173.6-20.3v359h121.6v-359zm101.2 338.7h-80.8V83.8h80.8z">
        </path>
      </symbol>
    </defs>
</svg>


<!-- Play/Pause Toggle Button -->
<button id="play-toggle">
  <svg id="play-toggle-icon" viewBox="0 0 512 512" width="32" height="32">
    <use href="#vjs-icon-play"></use>
  </svg>
</button>

const icon = document.querySelector('#play-toggle-icon use');

const onPlay = () => {
  icon.setAttribute('href', '#vjs-icon-play');
};

const onPause = () => {
  icon.setAttribute('href', '#vjs-icon-pause');
};

📘 Quick Reference :-

ℹ <defs> : It is an SVG container used to store elements such as <symbol>, <gradient>, <filter>, etc., that are not rendered directly in the SVG output. Instead, these definitions can be referenced later by other SVG elements.

ℹ <symbol> : It is an SVG element used to define reusable graphic content — such as icons, shapes, or patterns — without rendering it immediately.

ℹ <use> : It is an element in SVG which is designed to reference and reuse other SVG elements—especially things like icons, shapes, or graphic elements—without duplicating code.

💡 Why This Approach Is Better?

✅ Security: No innerHTML, hence safer from injection attacks.

✅ Performance: The SVG is only defined once; only the reference (href) changes on interaction.

✅ Maintainability: Centralised icon definitions make it easy to manage and scale.



Let me know what do you think about this?


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Damandeep Singh


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