SVG has the added problem of not knowing what size/detail it needs to be rendered to - while the image has a size it never knows to what scale it's going to be

SVG has the added problem of not knowing what size/detail it needs to be rendered to - while the image has a size it never knows to what scale it's going to be drawn. If we could provide hints we'd be able to cache a bitmap and scale it without the need to redraw. Even better would be to do away with the bitmap altogether and draw them as triangles. I'd love to see some of the new vector map detail algorithms applied to SVG - the ones where you throw away any detail smaller than a pixel. Then we'd be able to zoom smoothly or (if the points need to be calculated and cached) progressively loading (and possibly streaming) detail.