SVG and the Indexing of Web Standards 98
Posted
by
kdawson
from the formata-non-grata dept.
from the formata-non-grata dept.
wombatmobile writes "The world's most popular search engine company is a leading supporter of open standards. It pours money and people into initiatives that promote, assist, support and implement Web standards. As a core foundation of is mission statement, all web assets should ideally be of a kind that it can work with. Strange then, that the world's most popular search engine doesn't index all of the current important Web standards formats. Doug Schepers of W3C blogs about how Scalable Vector Graphics content is recognized and not recognized by search engines, currently and historically." Readability really helps out on this site.
Re:Poorly rendered (Score:3, Interesting)
That site [schepers.cc] serves as a poster child for why Safari 5.0's "Reader" feature exists.
And why's that? It's not especially long/tall and even when viewing a 500 pixels rendition in FF there is always a landmark, so to speak, which means one rarely loses their place. Reader is definitely handy; I think it's great for reading short stories posted online*, but I fail to see what's wrong with the site in question besides being another damn blog...
*Preferably as .txts, but anything is better than a 10-page ad fest. One of the good things about adjustable font size is that I can decide how much text will be on a page.
SVGs are the future, imho (Score:4, Interesting)
You could implement whole web-apps as a single SVG file if you so desired. That is, if all browsers had full support of SVGs- and as my job this summer is in part to work on WebKit SVG support, let me assure you, nobody is fully compliant yet. But we're getting there. (Damn you Sub-resource loading!)
Well, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
SVG is one displayable object type within a canvas.
SVG is something that I wish had taken off, but I think it is doomed. It is a wonderful format - I've written a few SVG generators for various purposes, and it is clean, easy and beautiful. I think it was missing a champion - Adobe dabbled with it, but it seems like it was a hedged bet for them - they always prefer things over which they have more control, which I guess should be expected behavior by now.
Or maybe the problem is that it is too general-purpose, so support has been diffuse, with no clear niche to really win in.
Or both. But this has happened before - a great technology that through historic accident and/or failing to have a compelling story to carry it doesn't quite get the combination of attention and demand that drives adoption. It is too bad - the combination of SVG and JS are really quite elegant for a broad class of neato things. (Which might be the problem- it see like the rule is when given the option, always use elegant for yourself, but bet against it. Enjoy the sushi, but put your money in fast food.)
Re:SVG in other files (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the answer is, you don't, without a schema that tells you what to expect, at least if you want to do it right.
More generally, you can guess how people embed it, and probably even be right a lot. But considering what a clusterfuck "XML" and things-that-look-like-XML-but-aren't, and things-that-don't-even-come-close-except-for-containing->-and-<, I'd hate to try for any general purpose use that anyone cared about.
I think life would be better for everyone if they stopped thinking about XML as something like a format, and instead looked at is more as a convention. Sometimes, life is good and SAX can parse it. Other times, some ca. 1998 system is emitting something that the marketing literature buried in a filing cabinet somewhere called something that ended in 'ML', and it doesn't have '|' or '::' in it.
Re:Severaly flawed stats (Score:5, Interesting)
You raise a good point, but I'm not actually talking about the actual amount of content on the web, I'm talking about how it is indexed and searchable (in this case, by Google). I'm sure that there is a lot more Flash content than my rough study indicates, and I could be clearer about that in my blog post, but for the purposes of discussing the relative representation in search results, I think it's fair to say that the presence (or lack of presence) of content is distorted by how easy it is to find it through the search engine.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much Flash or SVG content is on the web... both should be indexed and represented in search results. How we get to that point, and how we can make is fruitful for people searching for the content, is the interesting question.
Re:How can a limited user install a plug-in? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yea, when you come bundled by default on 95% of the PCs in the world, the fact that its a plugin means its just like any other plugin you'd try to get installed later.
Flash comes with Windows, all users think is that its being upgraded which is perceptually different to an end user than installing a new plugin, regardless of the fact that the one included with the OS is more or less useless nearly 10 years down the road.