[olliej]

Every browser engine said no to that nonsense.

The core issue iirc was that one of the major use cases for SVG was map/navigation systems where a number of environments required fully standardized systems. But they didn’t want to say implement a full browser stack”, so they just came up with their own “networking api” that was just “sockets!”.

A lot of this work predated html5, and the subsequent rationalization of web specs such that (for example) the xhr API was not fully specified, and it was not a separate specification from the rest of the browser stack, so SVG couldn’t just do what they could (in principle) do now.

The SVG WG was not the most functional - i recall that something a subset of the committee did at one point was to after the end of one person’s work day they rescheduled a meeting to later “that day” (while they were asleep) and took a vote without them present.

A number of other choices were made to the detriment of the spec for specific use cases (the various performance profiles have fundamentally incompatible rendering behavior rather than gradual decay, etc)

[themoonisachees]

Thanks for the explanations!

Funnily enough we did end up saying "implement a full browser stack" :/