It is so because we have had SVG way back in 2001, and have had vector graphics since almost the dawn of the computer era. We could have been building web pages out of pure SVG, and never would have had to worry about image resolution, JPG artifacts, or GIF patents. Even bandwidth would have been less of a concern.

Unfortunately, a certain large corporation which controls a major share of the web browser market didn’t want it that way.

So we live in a world where many give up in hopeless frustration at the various half-way measures we have to put up with, in this jackstraw tumble of patchwork technologies and methods. For many designers, the only sensible course is to draw the web page in a raster graphics editor, save it as a flat image, then manually cut it up into chunks and use a maze of browser-specific hacks to try to get the page to render coherently.

Just think what an SVG standard across browsers would have been like:

- Seamless with Javascript, XHTML, CSS, and XML.

- Scalable graphics would ensure that anybody using anything to view the page anywhere would see the exact same thing, with no extra effort from the developer.

- Open source and free, so there’s never a question of licenses.

- Inexpensive. There are about a dozen free SVG editors out there, and they all have features that blow away anything we currently us to lay out web pages.

- Gradients, rounded corners, transparency, perfect fonts, text along a path, shaped envelopes, textures, patterns… The web could have looked so much better for so little effort.

Tim Berners-Lee, patriarch of the World Wide Web, has shaken his finger at Microsoft as recently as a 2008 interview, for not supporting SVG in IE and thus holding the rest of us back. Perhaps, someday…