I disagree, I routinely manually mess with SVG (even SVG generated with a program like inkscape) because it lets me add interactivity and animations. That's the

I disagree, I routinely manually mess with SVG (even SVG generated with a program like inkscape) because it lets me add interactivity and animations. That's the killer feature for me: you can draw arbitrary vector shapes in a website, then hook into them using javascript the way you would any DOM element. There are a few subtleties to make it work well, but it's pretty straightforward. Here's an example: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20210212-185105_svg.png https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20210212-185105_svg.png All the elements and paths are SVG generated from some javascript. You can interact with the various elements, move them around and the paths are updated in real time. Of course you could do the same thing with a raster format by using a canvas and drawing a bitmap for instance, but SVG works at a higher level and lets you do these things a lot faster and probably with better performance. You can use CSS-styling, you can register javascript event callbacks etc... Or to put it another way: if SVG was meant as an opaque machine-to-machine format, why even bother with the insane overhead of XML instead of using some dense binary format?