@haverholm possibly to make sure it looks pixely on various high pixel density displays such as phones. Upscaling a pixely source image may end up looking either blurry when using smooth interpolation, or really odd when using nearest-neighbor interpolation with a non-integer scaling factor.
@m0xee You can tell the browser to upscale in a pixely way, but that doesn't solve the problem. Imagine what happens if you try to render a 32 by 32 pixel graphic into a 35 by 35 pixel area. What you need here *is* anti-aliasing, but not of the pixels, but of the pixel boundaries. SVG I think is just an easy way to get that.