The problem is there is in fact a massive difference, at least by what I know. Might be wrong.
- Plugins (and BTW the_content, which is commonly known as the post Body, or the_title, commonly known as the Post Title), all pose a security risk since you can upload, add, save and else whatever you want in, and with it. But, only admins can do so. Or, more specifically, only users with specific caps.
- Uploading Media is also not available to everyone by default but there is no real granular fine-tuning - once you give a person upload media rights they can upload media.
If you add SVG support to that, they can upload SVG.
That might mean, a front end logged out user will add SVG as media because, there are tons of forms allowing to add media in the front end.
Now, you would never give a guest plugin upload rights, not even an editor.
And while it is possible to fine-tune the media upload restrictions (probably not that easy thou), it is at the end the same as uploading a plugin when you start adding “dangers” to it.
Uploading Plugins, is only possible for users with a certain cap, generally, the admin, and no one would ever ask to allow this for other users.
Uploading media can even be done by a Guest, if you expose it, or an editor, or author, and is even without SVG already quite dangerous (not only SVG can hold malicious code or else metadata)
So while this is possible to do, it requires a lot more than just supporting SVG upload in core.
You will need to make cap checks inside the uploading mechanisms and screens, restrict SVG to be uploadable only by the “certain” cap (which has to be invented first), and then also hide eventual SVG (I guess) from users that should not tamper with it.
This also brings up the other question that will follow once you allow SVG upload… Why can I not edit it? ClassicPress must allow to edit it if it wants to… etc. You know what I mean I guess
At the end we will build a Adobe Illustrator into media uploader. Because you can’t just “rotate” a SVG like you can rotate a png. Yet users will want to do it. And so forth.
It is certainly frustrating that a 2021 CMS cannot deal with SVG natively, and yet, neither can Facebook, nor Squarespace, neither any other to me known CMS or else *MS.
For example Drupal has an “extra module” (and by what I know that is a Plugin in our world) to allow that
So… we do have that already in WP (the plugin).
We just need it to be CP compatible and that for the time to come, then we wouldn’t need to deal with this in core.
I use SVG often, and I do not even see why I would want to upload them to media - they are not media, they are code in my eyes. I paste code in an editor, not in a media library.
Even if I would, I still couldn’t give that right to my writers, who would upload god knows what from the free SVG libraries/ that, would then compare to my editors uploading free plugins to my site. And I wouldn’t want that.
So if only me as admin ends up being able to upload an SVG which in fact ends up being code in an editor, I prefer just copy pasting my SVG into said editor, or if I really need it, I upload it to my server and call it by file (which I really never did with SVG, as I said, for me that is like HTML code, which I add in an editor, not uploaded as a file)
I vote to close this and declare it an important, but plugin territory feature, but can’t since we only have yay votes.