HN user
>I would argue that data fetching from DBs or caches will be the majority of execution time.
People keep saying that, and I would like to see some numbers for that also.
The DB dataset could be already cached in memory, for example.
Yes, because academic publishing should keep up with the latest tech news and gossip, that's its main use and strength.
It's supported in places where a vector format is not (namely, older versions of IE that don't support SVG).
Plus, icons are easier to handle as a regular text/font asset, than as SVG, and you can use all the tools available for web typography for them.
That said, why we never had a simple vector _IMAGE_ format for the web is beyond me.
By which, I mean a simple format to display vector images at various sizes, a simple vector decoder, with no animation, javascript, styling and other stuff. A JPEG/PNG equivalent for static vector images.
That would be dead easy to add support for, compared to SVG (just treat as any other image format) and it would handle lots of use cases.