Jon A. Cruz wrote:
The primary reason for allowing Inkscape to render its own icons is that Inkscape usually does a better job of it.
librsvg (used by Gnome) is sufficient to render all our icons - it causes no corruption or artifacts. It doesn' t support advanced features like masks or filters, but we're not using them in our current icons, and the Tango style doesn't use them either.
We're still at the point where most of the serious icon artists create in SVG but have to deploy in multiple PNG versions per icon due to the runtime limitations of current display engines.
I don't think it's only because of the limitations. Even with perfect SVG support I would still deploy in PNG, because it's faster to load. And with multiple sizes looking different, there's little reason not to deploy PNG. The solution is not for Inkscape to behave differently than the rest of the desktop, but rather to improve librsvg, or modularize Inkscape enough that its renderer could replace librsvg (I doubt if that's possible, because librsvg is SAX-based).
Regards, Krzysztof Kosiński