Per my reading of SVG2 we should not be dispatching any events in this case:

"The load event is dispatched only to structurally external elements and to the Window, when the corresponding external resources have finished loading."

SVG 1.1 had a more vague formulation which I believe was something like: "Send SVGLoad to an element as soon as it have been parsed." (and no browser implemented it like that IIRC). This is likely why you see other browsers dispatching 'load' (and/or some alias thereof) in this case.

This was discussed a few years back:

https://www.w3.org/2013/11/15-svg-minutes.html#item07

I'd suggest you raise this issue on the spec (at https://github.com/w3c/svgwg/) for clarification. Thank you.

Hi,

thanks for the insight. 

I)
a)The SVG embedded in the initial HTML raises an onload event.
b)The SVG injected by innerHTML does not.
Both do not refer to external resources. 

I would expect an symmetric behavior. From you explanation both should not raise an onload event, right?
If you are not able to remove the onload notification for a) because of compatibility reasons, from my point of view it would make sense to introduce it in b)

II)
Actually the testcase was a bit simplified. Our actual usecase is to load an SVG from a symbol library in this format: 

<svg onload="notifyOnload(this)"><use xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="./svgSymbolLib.svg#star"></use></svg>

which is an external resource and we need to get notified when it is loaded.

Any suggestions how to achieve that?

Many thanks for the fast processing.

I looked at how this is currently handled in Blink, and realized that it likely was intended to dispatch a 'load' for this case. Or rather there are some oddities like:

document.body.innerHTML = '<svg onload=alert("bar")><svg onload=alert("foo")></svg></svg>';

Which will alert "foo" but not "bar".

For your case with <use>, we will dispatch 'load' for the <use> element in this case (since it is "structurally external"). Firefox for instance will not though (only does that for <svg>.) Another thing to be aware of with <svg onload> is that'll be dispatched when the end tag (</svg>) has been parsed, so it doesn't really make any guarantees as to the readiness of the subtree rooted at the <svg>.

Our use case is to inline an external SVG symbol libray in the document on demand to achieve some better CSS theming behavior.
Actually <use>.onload works perfect for this scenario. Thanks for that hint.

As you described Firefox is propagating the event only for the <svg> while IE raises it additionally for <use> as well.
Safari seems to propagate the “load” on <use> element twice (parsed and external resource loaded?).

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