Vector graphics were avoided on the Web because they made pages perform poorly. The advice was widespread, and it was easy to see why if you did encounter an SVG on the Web.
We couldn’t draw with CSS yet, but in the earliest days of that being possible, it was slow, too.
Moore’s law outran those problems, but I suspect our collectively dropping the old “raster = considerate to your user” attitude (including and especially in what we do with CSS these days) is an under-appreciated factor in the astonishingly terrible performance of the modern Web—Javascript gets most of the blame, but I think a lot of it’s giant CSS engines and doing so very much more runtime rendering on the client.
Vector graphics were avoided on the Web because they made pages perform poorly. The advice was widespread, and it was easy to see why if you did encounter an SVG on the Web.
We couldn’t draw with CSS yet, but in the earliest days of that being possible, it was slow, too.
Moore’s law outran those problems, but I suspect our collectively dropping the old “raster = considerate to your user” attitude (including and especially in what we do with CSS these days) is an under-appreciated factor in the astonishingly terrible performance of the modern Web—Javascript gets most of the blame, but I think a lot of it’s giant CSS engines and doing so very much more runtime rendering on the client.