[gulpahum]

You're right. SVG2 requires full CSS support. CSS brings lots of complexity, like calc(), CSS variables and so on. All that is needed, because web developers use SVG2 inline in HTML documents. It is also becoming more common to embed HTML in SVG. It's going to be one big tag soup. All that is better for the web, but worse as a stable image format.

There are also plans to create SVG-in-OpenType fonts, which would embed SVG inside web fonts. I have very mixed feelings about that. It is nice to have fonts with multiple colors, gradients and animations. On the other hand, do I want to have the same compatibility problems with fonts as I already have with HTML/SVG? I'm almost hoping that SVG-in-OT fails and Microsoft's simpler multi-color font format wins.

[ygra]

It saddens me a bit, actually. SVG had lots of features way before CSS and now they're forced to adopt them to not confuse people who use HTML/CSS. CSS to my knowledge never even tried adopting features in an SVG-compatible way.