Let’s say you want to create a nice, user friendly, device-agnostic, lightly interactive map. SVG immediately comes to mind as a good technology to use in such a case. Pretty good browser support now days and it doesn’t require plugins. For those who can’t use SVG, you can always provide fallback support as needed.
Now let’s say that you want to provide captions and a key legend for your map. Great! SVG supports fonts and font embedding!
But what’s this? Firefox does not support SVG fonts? SVG, meet the brick wall of browser implementation or the lack thereof.
So we turn our nice SVG text into shapes and use the “desc” and “title” attributes to at least make our formerly-text content somewhat accessible.
To end on a more hopeful note, it looks like there’s a standard being developed to allow Open Type fonts to carry SVG path data, and the Firefox team may adopt this, thus solving Firefox’s SVG font “problem”.