[gwern]

So many bugs. The background will break in dark-mode, or the foreground. The bounding box will cut off the image contents. You export in SVG to get nice text rendering and everything carefully aligned, and it looks in Chromium the way it did in Inkscape... but then in Firefox everything is misaligned, defeating the point compared to if you had just used a PNG. It doesn't work as a social media thumbnail. And so on.

[i80and]

So for a contrasting anecdote, we've used SVGs for years in production on a high traffic site, using an automated Inkscape pipeline to turn text into plain paths, and it's worked perfectly

[simpaticoder]

The decision then is between building "an automated Inkscape pipeline to turn text into plain paths" and creating a PNG.

[i80and]

For diagrams, PNGs just are not a good choice. We did this as a response to mainstreaming high dpi displays back when Retina hit the market.

It's been a big success. The resulting SVGs are significantly smaller in filesize than PNG, and are crisp and readable no matter how the user zooms in.

The path conversion is a single inkscape command line invocation. It's worth doing.

If it comes out of a vector application, you likely don't want to rasterize it for distribution.

[gwern]

(These are just the ones I recall offhand from personal experience on gwern.net using SVG in quite limited ways, mostly just for the link-icons.)