Personally I found the SVG specification very readable and understandable as well. It also has the benefit of accurately describing what the renderer should do (a lot of resources out there are outdated or inaccurate).
As long as you target web browsers, things generally work out fine, in my experience, with very few gaps in the feature set. Bugs, however ... Safari is seemingly constantly broken (as was Edge until a year ago or so, but then they scrapped EdgeHTML anyway), Chrome and Firefox sometimes seem to compete on who will break things the most in trying to make rendering faster (as long as rendering doesn't have to be correct it can be made nearly infinitely fast ...).
The blurry variant of "Making Things Stick" reminds me of a hydrogen molecule bonding[1].
It might be interesting to tune an svg filter against a ground truth like [2] - if the difference can be made small, it might be useful for educational interactives?
I wonder if one could get something complex like [3]?
The series is amazing, I submitted a different article earlier and there is a comment of mine giving shortcuts to different aspects of the map generation. See here:
I wish there was an SVG2 that was more like modern 3D graphics APIs. My druthers: vertex stores, index buffers, stroke & shapes paths, and then both "standard" (prebaked) and "user-defined" (shader) shaders for texturing the strokes & shapes.
Click through to the codepen links at the end. They’re rendering in Firefox and Chrome for me, though slightly differently, and with Safari I don’t see the lines at all.
I've been playing around making a HTML/CSS blackboard for TV displays etc. I used a black background, a semi-transparent PNG mask for the dust/old writing effect and used some handwriting fonts. I applied a slight blur to the text, but the effect isn't quite right.
I'm going to try using SVG text and applying similar filters to produce a chalk effect. I hadn't thought of that approach, so thanks for the great post!
If anyone gets interested in the SVG format, I've also found this to be a very useful resource:
https://svgpocketguide.com/book/