alt Hacker NewsAuthor here: I've just made a ninja edit of the post as it didn't really make clear a quite important point - the SVG is literally 20 years old, and still works, astonishingly. I'm not sure much else I wrote around the time would still work without some editing!
The reverse is kind of true: In the beginning, SVGs were not really an option since it lacked adoption across all major browsers, or more specifically its integration was very heterogenous.
So a SVG you authored 20 years ago for some browser will likely work everywhere today.