The idea was that you can embed only the glyphs used in a text. For example, instead of embedding thousands of existing Chinese characters, embed only 20 of them. Embedding is necessary anyway because otherwise you cannot guarantee that your image will be displayed correctly on the other machine.
Also, allowing CSS inside SVG is not a great idea because the SVG renderer needs to include full CSS parser, and for example, will Inkscape work correctly when there is embedded CSS with base64 fonts? Not sure.
> Also, allowing CSS inside SVG is not a great idea because the SVG renderer needs to include full CSS parser, and for example, will Inkscape work correctly when there is embedded CSS with base64 fonts? Not sure.
For better or worse, CSS parsing and WOFF support are both mandatory in SVG 2.[0][1] Time will tell whether this makes it a dead spec!
Also, allowing CSS inside SVG is not a great idea because the SVG renderer needs to include full CSS parser, and for example, will Inkscape work correctly when there is embedded CSS with base64 fonts? Not sure.