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SVG isn't necessarily the panacea you're making it out to be. If you have a highly detailed SVG that looks great at large sizes, when you rasterize it at low resolutions, it looks like a gray soup.

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Haiku's icon format[0] seems to solve this issue: not only it supports per-shape level of detail, allowing elements of an icon to be hidden, appear or replaced based on the icon scale size, it is also much smaller than SVG (supposedly average size for Haiku icons is 500-700 bytes) so it can be used directly.

[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon...

You can make SVGs responsive based on their raster size[0] using media queries. So there's no need for a grey soup when the icon is rastered at small dimensions.

[0] http://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsiv...

That's something the browser is doing, not something the SVG renderer is doing. Someone still has to make multiple versions of the same image with different levels of detail, and some software still needs to pick the right one for a given resolution.

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