Comment by pupppet
15 hours ago
This is what happens when there isn't an adult in the room to reign things in, you get project overreach. SVGs should never have supported scripting. You want scripting in SVGs, fine, make it a different file format.
I can't imagine the cumulative number of man hours wasted on this problem when the vast majority of users were just looking for a way to make their logos look sharp.
Or you can literally just manipulate your SVG through the DOM in an external JS script... I still have no idea what the original motivation behind scripts in SVGs was.
While SVG is a web technology, for the longest time you had to install SVG support as a browser plug-in. I remember installing Adobe SVG viewer around 2000. It was used for interactive visualizations.
I'm don't remember precisely but I don't think you could script it from the DOM, I don't see how that could work if it's a plugin.
I imagine it may have been attractive to those who liked Flash.
I think it may have been the other way (ie attractive to those who didn't like flash) - SVG was seen as a potential flash replacement?
OG actionscript was very similar to Javascript. It only started to diverge when type hints were introduced.
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> SVGs should never have supported scripting.
I would even go further: HTML should never have supported scripting.
... or third party requests. Scratch the H in HTML and internet tracking would have never happened.
You could track people without links. You just couldn't go to other places without links.