SVG and the Indexing of Web Standards

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.

Comments

Severaly flawed stats

[Stan Vassilev]

I don't know why this guy is using filetype Google searches to find out how common SVG and Flash content is.

SVG content makes up just 0.106% of all Web content, by my rough estimation. Flash is almost 5 times as common as SVG. That's pretty grim for SVG. ... But wait, let's put that into perspective. Flash is about 4.8 times more common than SVG. HTML is roughly 838 times more common than SVG. 838 times. Flash content comprises approximately 0.52% of all Web content, and HTML is roughly 189 times more common than Flash.

Let *me* put that into perspective. Most Flash content is deployed via JavaScript, so it won't show in a Google filetype search. None of the sites with Flash I've worked on would pop SWF filetype results in Google. Saying that Flash to SVG are 5 to 1 is hilarious, given the-still-leading browser on the market, IE, supports zero SVG content (to change with IE9 which is in alpha right now).

Saying that Flash is 0.52% of the content of the web is also hilarious. Even just counting the countless embedded YouTube players in blogs would change those numbers drastically.

Re:Severaly flawed stats

[Anonymous Coward]

Google does follow links in Javascript (yes, Googlebot can execute JS these days) and the PS on these sites presumably does contain links to .swf files.

Google follows JS links when it's a string literal that looks like an URL. I.e. Google will follow this:

var gohere = 'http://example.com/123.pdf'; ... ...

But it won't dynamically execute and detect urls constructed at runtime, for example:

function openDoc(domain, docid) { document.location = 'http://' + domain + '/' + docid + '.pdf'; }
openDoc('example.com', '123');

A version of the Googlebot can execute JavaScript, that's correct, but that's not used for basic indexing, but for other purposes (aiding spam filtering techniques and so on).

Re:too complicated?

[colinrichardday]

SVG may be complicated for animations/interactivity, but static images aren't that hard to do.

canvas

[thoughtsatthemoment]

With Apple and others pushing canvas, the future of SVG isn't looking bright. I am not sure which one is better, but SVG seems to be the one on the way out, especially after Adobe stopped supporting SVG.

Re:too complicated?

[Marillion]

While some meaningful exceptions do exist, SVG is really not much more than an XML based implementation of Postscript.

Re:Standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

because almost nobody uses svg except the people who care and are aware of it and those people are able to find it. next fucking question, please.

Re:SVGs are the future, imho

[pjt33]

easy to make and edit by hand (it's xml!)

Assuming that you can look at a series of coordinates for Bezier control points and visualise the result. If you can, I venture to suggest that you're exceptional.