Re: [rfc-i] What do do about SVG

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2020, at 12:11, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Yes. While Mike is correct in principle, I think that rendering will not
> be a problem in practice, simply because browsers have to render whatever
> is out there in the real world anyway.

This is a great question still.  Mike's response gave me pause, but only because it raised the question of what it means for these to be of "archival" quality, and whether that even makes sense.  In that regard, a JPG has better prospects; SVG is not static, it continues to evolve.

However, I think that Adam and Brian's pragmatism is what we should look to for an answer.  Our editorial guidance already ensures that comprehension of diagrams is not absolutely necessary to the understanding of the document.  And many cases will have ASCII art fallbacks.  That means our SVG dependency is very much opportunistic.

Pragmatism suggests we just apply a little diligence and not expend too much effort following the path of RFC 7996, now that we know that to have failed to produce a good outcome.  It was a fine experiment, but it did not turn out to be practical.

That is, we test that the image loads consistently in a reasonable sample of implementations and then have some tools to catch known problems.
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