I guess I come at it from the point of view of the DOM, where a single shape as a DOM node that can be styled makes the most sense. If you had a path with child

I guess I come at it from the point of view of the DOM, where a single shape as a DOM node that can be styled makes the most sense. If you had a path with child nodes as real DOM nodes things would get weird, because how do things like contradicting fill styles work? As I said in my other reply though, I'm just splitting hairs really. As a user I think being able to specify the shape by just using the single d attribute is nice. Maybe because it invokes warm childhood memories of using turtle graphics back in the 80s :)