Vector icons with Raphaël

Do your math based on your use case:<p>This is the top-left question mark icon.<p>M16,1.466C7.973,1.466,1.466,7.973,1.466,16c0,8.027,6.507,14.534,14.534,14.534c8.027,0,14.534-6.507,14.534-14.534C30.534,7.973,24.027,1.466,16,1.466z M17.328,24.371h-2.707v-2.596h2.707V24.371zM17.328,19.003v0.858h-2.707v-1.057c0-3.19,3.63-3.696,3.63-5.963c0-1.034-0.924-1.826-2.134-1.826c-1.254,0-2.354,0.924-2.354,0.924l-1.541-1.915c0,0,1.519-1.584,4.137-1.584c2.487,0,4.796,1.54,4.796,4.136C21.156,16.208,17.328,16.627,17.328,19.003z<p>It's around 430 bytes. Cropped from a screenshot, Photoshop says 705 bytes for gif, 643 bytes for 8 bit png (without transparency or scalability or anything).<p>Raphael.js from the page is &#62;50KB. There's also an onload function to initialize the path, around 1KB (includes loops etc. specific to this page).

These are really going to come in handy. All these wonderful icon sets that people have made available for free are really making the web a better place. And this one is live resizable vector... Quite fantastic.

That's very impressive; but what are the accessibility implications? Can a vector icon have ALT text, for example?

To be honest, I'm a bit more impressed by the flash-like capabilities of raphael.js rather than the icon set itself. It's great stuff. <a href="http://raphaeljs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://raphaeljs.com/</a>

What is the trade off between hosting icon/picture image files versus drawing them? Is there one? Is this method (drawing through js) better if client download speeds are really slow?

How do you convert your existing vector icons to this (pathstring) format? Or did he use some custom tool to draw them?

This is just SVG though right?

Anyone got an idea how to easily rasterize these?<p>Is there an easier way than building a web page with the image and screenshotting it?

How is Raphael.js (and svg tags) for cross-browser compatibility?