I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Juan Carlos has a good point about verbosity and minification (I would have started with that here if he hadn't covered it so well), but there's another really big aspect to consider here: SVG is nowhere near as accessibility friendly as well written HTML+CSS.
The reason for this is largely that good HTML is semantic markup, while SVG is almost pure presentational markup. The lack of semantic structure in SVG means that screen readers and other assistive technologies have no real way to know what each block of text is supposed to be, let alone what order to read them out in. Now, it's technically possible to work around this, but doing so requires an insane amount of effort, and almost always means you have to modify the raw SVG XML by hand, and even then you're still not going to be as assistive-technology friendly as a properly written HTML page.
Juan Carlos has a good point about verbosity and minification (I would have started with that here if he hadn't covered it so well), but there's another really big aspect to consider here: SVG is nowhere near as accessibility friendly as well written HTML+CSS.
The reason for this is largely that good HTML is semantic markup, while SVG is almost pure presentational markup. The lack of semantic structure in SVG means that screen readers and other assistive technologies have no real way to know what each block of text is supposed to be, let alone what order to read them out in. Now, it's technically possible to work around this, but doing so requires an insane amount of effort, and almost always means you have to modify the raw SVG XML by hand, and even then you're still not going to be as assistive-technology friendly as a properly written HTML page.
Thank you. This is the answer I was looking for. Now I see why no one uses it in the way i described.