> It kind of seems to me like it has been a mistake to have both of these as completely separate things - something like a <canvas> that had a standard scene graph/metafile type library with it (that you could optionally use or not) that included hit testing would make more sense. That seems to be how things are going anyway with various libraries building on <canvas>.

Well, the Web has been built on mistakes and false starts. In this case the overlap between SVG and <canvas> seems mostly harmless (except for the browser bloat). But Javascript JIT's/graphics libraries combined with hardware accelerated <canvas> sure seems to be the likely winner at this point...

Hi Dave,

> In this case the overlap between SVG and <canvas> seems
> mostly harmless (except for the browser bloat).

Well, the other harm would come just from considerable browser development time sunk into some area that may not pan out.

The level of complexity involved with the whole SVG object model seems to be pretty extensive, for example there are 491 files in WebKit's \svg folder... That's a huge amount of effort in development, testing, bug fixing, ...

Certainly it's true that it is hard to know in advance which particular technology is going to become highly used or not... But on the other hand having too many huge mechanisms implemented and needed to be maintained can make it harder for browsers to be nimble as well.

- Michael