I love this Josh! I recently discovered Protomaps (https://protomaps.com) and have been having a lot of fun doing mapping without paying Google or Mapbox a small fortune for the privilege. I found the the basemaps look much better than the protomaps site makes them appear (they're super zoomed out in the samples where the styles don't come together as well as they do when zoomed in)
Super neat, the end result looks great and adds a lot to the posts. On the downside, inlining the map causes the HTML to balloon up to ~500kB/~180kB gzipped, compared to 30kB/10kB on this post (which lacks a map). The site is already insanely fast, but you could pull the map SVG into an actual file, so it's cached between pages, and becomes a lower-priority resource (which will ~halve First Contentful Paint). Then you'd just position the circle on top of that generic map file!
Indeed - looks like SVGO can crush that map from 500kB down to like 80kB! Users on constrained data plans will love that. Of course, the author notes they want higher fidelity at some point. They could consider breaking the SVG into quadrants, perhaps? Or something more clever :)
the author is also using many large, multi-megabyte photos in their travel posts, so I'm not sure how significant the size of the SVG content is, in comparison
That means users are staring at blank for longer. That can really stink on a poor connection.
Images are requested at a lower priority and so don't cause the same problems for rendering. But it's a great idea to compress them, too, and use something like `srcset` to send an appropriately sized version!
I had myself this itch to scratch and ended up making an overly over-engineered tool to do just that: https://cartosvg.com/
I think it might interest you as it covers all your use cases (except the responsiveness part maybe), and personally I thin it can lead to quite beautiful results :)
