Give it a try. Well, why not just use jQuery or D3? Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. Made with love and Ruby on Rails. Well add a variable for how many rectangles, width and height. By making one small change to our code we can make it work as it should, observe below: Now, the differences under the hood between createElementNS and createElement, I couldn't tell you, though it's clear that it somehow tells the browser it is creating an SVG rectangle element, rather than just a rectangle element to go, um, somewhere else, somehow, I guess. When selecting an SVG in Pinegrow there are two checkboxes in the Properties panel , 'Fill with current color' and 'Stroke with current color'. This is because the HTML rendered controls the positioning before handing off to the SVG rendered to place the internal SVG contents. Circles? Now I am experimenting to develop an small library to enable svg geometries to make them snappable on top/inside others svg elements.