Are there any plans to support embedded bitmaps in inkscape?
I realize that being it an SVG editor (actually it is quickly becomming THESVG editor) it has to follow the standard, however I kind of thought that the compressed file was similar to the OASIS specification in terms of selfcontaining the main SVG vector grapic, plus any bitmaps associated with the file. This could be very helpful especially to share fully editable files as the bitmap path would be included with the file itself. Just a thought, though.
Sure you can always convert bitmaps into vectors and work from there, but the bitmaps->vectors tend to lose quality, not to mention that the file gets really heavy on the computer and actions such simply scrolling (especially on "lower end" machines") can consume a lot of CPU cycles as the vectors are calculated. I also realize that this would be drifting a bit from the SVG specification and may no be what the development team would actually want, but maybe supporting also this kind of behaviour would prove to be beneficial too in the long run... I don't know.
It's just a mere suggestion.