Use SVG in Elm.
This is based on the virtual-dom approach used by elm-html. You can read more about the performance improvements this gives you here
This library also aims to be the most basic API. In some cases it is possible to use union types to build nicer abstractions, but this starts bringing personal taste into things and has some additional maintainance cost if the underlying spec changes. I think it is best to build such abstractions on top of this library as a separate package.