Extra SVG capabilities and oddities

Let’s put aside the foibles of browsers for a moment and consider what some of these features in the table actually allow, and why you may or may not want to make use of them.

SVGs will always render as sharp as the viewing device will allow and regardless of the manner of insertion. For most practical situations, resolution independence is usually reason enough to use SVG. It’s then just a question of choosing whichever insertion method suits your workflow and the task at hand.

However, there are other capabilities and oddities that are worth knowing about, such as SMIL animation, different ways to link to external style sheets, marking internal styles with character data delimiters, amending an SVG with JavaScript, and making use of media queries within an SVG. Let’s cover those next.

SMIL animation

SMIL animations (https://www.w3.org/TR/smil-animation/) are a way to define animations for an SVG within the...