You likely haven't heard of this before because, frankly, SVG has been a "no go" area since it had such shoddy IE support until recently [0]. And like it or not IE still claims a large enough market share to matter.
IE 10 (which offered a richer SVG experience) wasn't available until Sept 2012. Since then 10+ has gained market share, but there are still a lot of XP and Vista users causing problems (or pirate Windows 7 users who cannot install SP1).
SVG is actually really cool. About damn time it is getting usable across the board. Hopefully two years from now using SVG will be a "no brainer" in terms of backwards compatibility.
I've been working with SVGs quite a bit lately. Dealing with them is at times rewarding, and others extraordinarily frustrating.
Case in point: different browsers handle adding an SVG filter onto a DOM element / SVG parent element / SVG child element very differently (in Firefox, if an SVG element that holds a filter is display:none, and you apply that filter to an element that is visible, the filter not only is not applied - but the element it is applied to also becomes display:none). Unfortunately, it's also not one of those things you can feature detect for: out come the user agent tools again...
But yes, SVG is very very cool. For our use case, even IE9 is fairly up to par with it.
IE 10 (which offered a richer SVG experience) wasn't available until Sept 2012. Since then 10+ has gained market share, but there are still a lot of XP and Vista users causing problems (or pirate Windows 7 users who cannot install SP1).
SVG is actually really cool. About damn time it is getting usable across the board. Hopefully two years from now using SVG will be a "no brainer" in terms of backwards compatibility.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics#Nativ...