I found this thread about SVG in the firefox img-tag bug
"external SVG not loaded from img tag":
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276431
and it cites some interesting ways to visualize svg in wikipedia, that might
be useful to inspire some wikimedia developer here:
--- Comment #42 from Jeff Walden (remove +bmo to email) <jwalden+bmo(a)mit.edu>
2007-10-24 14:14:19 PDT ---
While SVG may in reality have been designed as a document format, its uses
in practice are primarily as an image/graphics format, whose natural home in
the mind of a web developer has always been in <img>. I don't think you can
reasonably fight this intuition, particularly without support from other
browsers.
--- Comment #43 from Guilherme Fonseca <fonseca(a)cs.umd.edu> 2007-10-24
14:42:29 PDT ---
Let's look, for example, at the following wikipedia image page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hexahedron.svg
It contains a PNG preview of an SVG image and a link to it. I believe that
it
would be cleaner if the preview used the svg image itself, and left
rendering
of the SVG for the web browser.
--- Comment #44 from Jeff Walden (remove +bmo to email) <jwalden+bmo(a)mit.edu>
2007-10-24 14:58:06 PDT ---
(In reply to comment #43)
I believe that it would be cleaner if the preview used
the svg image
itself,
and left rendering of the SVG for the web browser.
It would indeed, but I don't think that's quite the distinction being made.
The question is whether it's worthwhile to support <img> when perfectly
adequate support already exists in <iframe>, <object>, etc. with understood
and effective security mechanisms in place to prevent the SVG (or any other
document format loaded instead) from escaping its prison. (There's no
reason Wikipedia couldn't do that now, with Accept or user-agent detection.)
Those security mechanisms would have to be modified or reinvented for
supporting SVG in <img>, or the document-support code would have to be
modified to provide an <img>-style context; implementing either is a
decent-sized task with lots of potential for regressions (and security ones,
at that).