Its not an svg. However that might be an idea for OP - rendering an svg is probably easier on the server, and you can have a blinking cursor with SMIL animations (full interactivity of course does not work when included as an <img> tag)
SVG also has hyperlinking although I've never actually tried it in the browser but if it worked then you could do a very strange but functional imagemap vector implementation.
Ah interesting. It's probably a pretty clean implementation then. No immediate workarounds come to mind.
There's ways you can obscure things, such as using an object tag, leaving it up to the browser to decide via a mime type header which you specify then as svg, buuut that won't work here.
Things are fairly locked down these days. Maybe there's something I'm not thinking of using a similar pattern (confuse the browser, tell it the answer and then have it generate the restricted type) ... Maybe something dealing with lang or codepages... There's still plenty of shenanigans there.
Back in the day I used to upload full-blown servers I wrote in postscript as my "profile image" and then they were blindly executed when trying to "convert" the file - imagemagick locked that down about 10 years ago though. Even back then usually some max execution timer would kill it after a minute or so. But it was fun.
