>What about SVG doesn't comply with "be used interchangeably with regular images"? You can use an SVG file anywhere you can use an image file—as the source of an img element, as a background-image, etc.
This carries over the whole penalty of the SVG engine (I did said "we have SVG for this but it's overkill", didn't I?)
I'd rather have a simplistic vector rendering engine that treats the result as a plain image (e.g could just rasterize the whole thing it and leave it at that instead of treating it as DOM nodes).
That, and I would prefer the new format being binary and more compact (including more compact than compressed SVG).
The simplicity of such an engine would make it also far more likely to have been added fifteen years before to all browsers, while waiting for SVG that took like a decade to appear and is still not supported by IE less than 10.
This carries over the whole penalty of the SVG engine (I did said "we have SVG for this but it's overkill", didn't I?)
I'd rather have a simplistic vector rendering engine that treats the result as a plain image (e.g could just rasterize the whole thing it and leave it at that instead of treating it as DOM nodes).
That, and I would prefer the new format being binary and more compact (including more compact than compressed SVG).
The simplicity of such an engine would make it also far more likely to have been added fifteen years before to all browsers, while waiting for SVG that took like a decade to appear and is still not supported by IE less than 10.