Thanks for reading!

I point out the limitations of this method explicitly. How is that “ignoring X”?

That doesn’t work, unfortunately: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14926189/creating-a-grad...

Layering CSS gradients doesn’t work, unfortunately: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14926189/creating-a-grad...

Thanks for letting me know about the rules. I’ve updated the blog post title as you suggested.

Thanks for all the comments. I’ve updated the title and some of the wording to address the feedback given here.

I’ve added another example to demonstrate how the technique can be used on blurry photographic backgrounds as well: https://peterhrynkow.com/performance/2019/01/13/blowing-up-i...

I think bicubic is here to stay since so many responsive websites depend on the browser to scale images smoothly.

To achieve the same effect, you would need a “gradient mesh” which is not supported by the current version of SVG.

Mesh gradients were slotted for SVG 2.0 but the feature has since been removed from the roadmap.

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gradient-meshes-and...