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+## Why not use canvas rather than SVG?
+
+Using canvas rather than SVG would require implementing a scenegraph, hit-testing,
+event dispatch, animation, and other features provided natively by SVG. All that is
+a significant amount of work, would have meant a longer time for the initial release
+of iD, and would likely increase the ongoing costs of maintenence and new features.
+
+On the other hand, SVG is already fast enough in many or most hardware/browser/OS/editing
+region combinations, and will only get faster as hardware improves and browser vendors
+optimize their implementations and take better advantage of hardware acceleration.
+
+In other words, the decision to use SVG rather than canvas was a classic performance
+vs. implementation cost tradeoff with strong arguments for trading off performance to
+reduce implementation costs.