Fix SVGs not scaling in IE9, IE10, and IE11

A.markdown

Fix SVG in <img> tags not scaling in IE9, IE10, IE11

IE9, IE10, and IE11 don't properly scale SVG files added with img tags when viewBox, width and height attributes are specified. View this codepen on the different browsers.

Image heights will not scale when the images are inside containers narrower than image widths. This can be resolved in 2 ways.

Use sed in bash to remove width and height attributes in SVG files

As per this answer on Stackoverflow, the issue can be resolved by removing just the width and height attributes.

This little script will recursively search your current working directory for SVG files, and remove the attributes for cross browser compatibility:

find ./ -name '*.svg' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "" -e 's/width="[0-9]*\.*\[0-9]*" //' -e 's/height="[0-9]*\.*\[0-9]*" //'

Caveats

Removing width and height attributes will force the image to occupy the full width of its container in non-IE browsers.

IE10 (other browsers require testing) will scale the images down to some arbitrary size - meaning you will need to add width: 100% to your CSS for those images to fit their containers.

Target IE with CSS

Since the above solution requires CSS anyways, we might as well use a hack to get IE to behave, and not worry about having to manage every individual SVG file.

The following will target all img tags containing an SVG file, in IE6+ (only IE9+ support SVG files, however).

/*
 * Let's target IE to respect aspect ratios and sizes for img tags containing SVG files
 *
 * [1] IE9
 * [2] IE10+
 */
/* 1 */
.ie9 img[src$=".svg"] {
  width: 100%; 
}
/* 2 */
@media screen and (-ms-high-contrast: active), (-ms-high-contrast: none) {
  img[src$=".svg"] {
    width: 100%; 
  }
}

Caveats

This targets every img tag with a src that ends in ".svg" in IE9, IE10, and IE11 - if you do not want this behaviour on a particular image, you will have to add a class to override this behaviour for that image.