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

Standards?

[girlintraining]

This is the great thing about standards: There's so many to choose from!

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

[digitalunity]

If they're counting Flash by simply comparing number of SWF files to HTML files, that might be right.

If you were to compare traffic from flash content and compare that to HTML or other web traffic, I think you'd see that a very high percentage of bandwidth is consumed by flash video.

Re:Severaly flawed stats

[I'm Schepers]

Hi, Stan-

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:Severaly flawed stats

[Stan Vassilev]

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.

This has been attempted before, which, in the case of Flash, resulted of pages and pages of SERP like these.

It's probably understandable why Google lowered the "rank" of Flash content in their SERP.

Indexing SVG is also of dubious benefits. Flat images may be a nice addition to the images section, if search engines have a good way of recognizing those from SVG-based interactive apps, but that's about it.

However, not all SVG files work outside the page they are embedded in, especially if they depend on related scripts. This is even more so the case with Flash, which often has its data sources loaded externally, based on parameters passed in-page. That's one more reason why people use JS for Flash embedding: it doesn't produce naked SWF files in search results, which rarely works anyway.

Searching is about keywords and phrases, so it works best with HTML, where the majority of text is. Image search is based on the text around the image, and SVG static image search will likely work best that way as well, so there's no pressing need to try to find couple of irrelevant words in a SVG file lost among thousands of vector/color data items.

In other words, indexing Flash/SVG seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

From TFA...

[Darkness404]

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.

How is that "grim" for SVG? Flash isn't just used for vector graphics and animations anymore....

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:Poorly rendered

[newcastlejon]

That site 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

[Mabbo]

We *need* to get full support for SVG going. Not as a replacement for flash, or any of that (though really, they could), but just as a basic image format for non-photographic images in computers. Vector graphics scale beautifully, work well with screen magnifiers for the visually impaired, are lightweight, easy to make and edit by hand (it's xml!).

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!)

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.

Re:SVGs are the future, imho

[BasilBrush]

Not quite the singular purpose. For images that suit line art:
2) ...media size tends to be lower with a vector representation.
3) ...the media remains editable at the line/object level rather than at the pixel level.

Re:SVGs are the future, imho

[BasilBrush]

IE8 and earlier are about 50% of browser use out there. So something approaching 50% of browsers in use support SVG. And those that don't can use plugins.

Flash managed to get accepted purely through the plugin route.

Well, no.

[abulafia]

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

[abulafia]

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:Google and Indexing

[AxeTheMax]

What information in a SVG would be useful to a searcher?

Think of maps and the text in them for a start.

Re:How can a limited user install a plug-in?

[BitZtream]

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.