You likely haven't heard of this before because, frankly, SVG has been a "no go" area since it had such shoddy IE support until recently [0]. And like it or not IE still claims a large enough market share to matter.

IE 10 (which offered a richer SVG experience) wasn't available until Sept 2012. Since then 10+ has gained market share, but there are still a lot of XP and Vista users causing problems (or pirate Windows 7 users who cannot install SP1).

SVG is actually really cool. About damn time it is getting usable across the board. Hopefully two years from now using SVG will be a "no brainer" in terms of backwards compatibility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics#Nativ...

I've been working with SVGs quite a bit lately. Dealing with them is at times rewarding, and others extraordinarily frustrating.

Case in point: different browsers handle adding an SVG filter onto a DOM element / SVG parent element / SVG child element very differently (in Firefox, if an SVG element that holds a filter is display:none, and you apply that filter to an element that is visible, the filter not only is not applied - but the element it is applied to also becomes display:none). Unfortunately, it's also not one of those things you can feature detect for: out come the user agent tools again...

But yes, SVG is very very cool. For our use case, even IE9 is fairly up to par with it.