Quoting Lee Braiden <lee_b@...786...>:
The display units thing is also strange to me. Does the spec actually say that you can't choose to use any other units by default, or simply that if you don't specify anything else *in the file*, it defaults to screen units?
It's kind of stupider than that. If you want to get consistent results, there is basically only one way to do it:
* define the document dimensions in your unit of choice
* establish a viewBox on the root element, so that the given width and height will be forced to correspond to the pixel dimensions
* specify everything in the actual document in px, because the viewBox will distort the relationship between px and other units in frustrating ways (and anyway, SVG paths have to be specified in px, so it's the only way to get things to line up reliably)
This is one area of SVG that I am rather less than fond of.
-mental