Question

I am trying to serve a svg map using:

<object data="map.svg" type="image/svg+xml" width="400" height="300">
    <embed src="map.svg" type="image/svg+xml" width="400" height="300" />
</object>

In Firefox this leads to a plugin prompt. If I rename map.svg to map.xml it shows the image correctly. I assume this is because the Django’s dev server (specifically django.views.static.serve) is not serving the svg with the correct mime-type. Is this the problem, and if so, is there a patch?

Answer 1

I don’t have Django available to test this at the moment but it looks like the static server uses the mimetypes library to determine the content type (specifically guess_type()).

With a little bit a Googling, I came across some code that you could probably throw in your settings.py to add support for the svg content type:

import mimetypes

mimetypes.add_type("image/svg+xml", ".svg", True)
mimetypes.add_type("image/svg+xml", ".svgz", True)

There’s also this blog post specific to Pylons but it mentions a similar issue. He specifies that the MIME types are stored in “/etc/mime.types” and that SVG is missing because it’s not an official MIME type. He may be right, since I can’t find a MIME-type for SVG anywhere on the IANA.