Comments on: Formata Non Grata http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata Technology upside down and backwards Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:51:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Schepers http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-191 Schepers Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:36:54 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-191 John, thanks for replying! I will pull together some examples, and get back to you. Optimizing SVG searchability should be a collaborative effort between search engines, the SVG Working Group, authoring tool vendors, and content creators, so we are happy to have an ongoing discussion with the Google search team. John, thanks for replying! I will pull together some examples, and get back to you. Optimizing SVG searchability should be a collaborative effort between search engines, the SVG Working Group, authoring tool vendors, and content creators, so we are happy to have an ongoing discussion with the Google search team.

]]> By: chris http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-188 chris Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:07:35 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-188 SVG is great. Even this fairly extensive post doesn't cover all aspects of SVG. SVG enjoys similar love other open source and web 2.0, and potential is still largely untapped. SVG will most likely remain a developers technology, even though it helps publish great web content. For example a relative newcomer to SVG can quickly design some compelling svg content without learning flash programming or css+javascript hacks or worse publishing content with text as a jpeg. In early svg days i stumbled onto and got very excited by tkzink, but that hasn't progressed. Anyway, all these things I'm writing about is a fairly hard slog to discover on the web using a search engine. Getting to yet undiscovered svg content (even if it's a blog about SVG such as this) is a losing proposition from the outset. You have to be prepared to cast your search net far and wide, and spend time wading through false hits. No wonder the general internet public has little or no exposure or say about SVG. In the end the results will show in the pudding, so to speak, when SVG content becomes more discoverable. Better indexing of SVG web content by google would be most welcome. Just like web2.0/ajax, wikipedia, youtube and many other great developments..this sort of thing will be driven by people who have courage and can reach some buttons. SVG is great. Even this fairly extensive post doesn’t cover all aspects of SVG. SVG enjoys similar love other open source and web 2.0, and potential is still largely untapped. SVG will most likely remain a developers technology, even though it helps publish great web content. For example a relative newcomer to SVG can quickly design some compelling svg content without learning flash programming or css+javascript hacks or worse publishing content with text as a jpeg.
In early svg days i stumbled onto and got very excited by tkzink, but that hasn’t progressed. Anyway, all these things I’m writing about is a fairly hard slog to discover on the web using a search engine. Getting to yet undiscovered svg content (even if it’s a blog about SVG such as this) is a losing proposition from the outset. You have to be prepared to cast your search net far and wide, and spend time wading through false hits. No wonder the general internet public has little or no exposure or say about SVG. In the end the results will show in the pudding, so to speak, when SVG content becomes more discoverable.
Better indexing of SVG web content by google would be most welcome. Just like web2.0/ajax, wikipedia, youtube and many other great developments..this sort of thing will be driven by people who have courage and can reach some buttons.

]]> By: John Mueller http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-187 John Mueller Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:31:57 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-187 Hi! I am a webmaster trends analyst here at Google and one of the things that I do is to get our engineers in touch with issues like this :). This is an interesting blog post and a great discussion about SVG files. I'm not completely in the picture on SVG files and how their contents might be indexable or useful in web-search, but I'll certainly pass this on to the teams here at Google to review.   If you have more compelling use-cases where the contents in SVG files would be highly relevant (but not findable in the search results at the moment), it would be great to hear about them. I realize that adoption always depends on a number of factors; I know our teams are aware of SVG content, but maybe there's something here that can help speed things up on our side as well :). Hi! I am a webmaster trends analyst here at Google and one of the things that I do is to get our engineers in touch with issues like this :) . This is an interesting blog post and a great discussion about SVG files. I’m not completely in the picture on SVG files and how their contents might be indexable or useful in web-search, but I’ll certainly pass this on to the teams here at Google to review.
 
If you have more compelling use-cases where the contents in SVG files would be highly relevant (but not findable in the search results at the moment), it would be great to hear about them. I realize that adoption always depends on a number of factors; I know our teams are aware of SVG content, but maybe there’s something here that can help speed things up on our side as well :) .

]]> By: Schepers http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-184 Schepers Fri, 16 Jul 2010 22:19:18 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-184 Susan, yes, great point. It shows that Google apparently does index the contents of SVG files, and could present them in their search results in more useful ways. Your specific search is clever and useful for a particular kind of search, but it should be more broadly applicable. Susan, yes, great point. It shows that Google apparently does index the contents of SVG files, and could present them in their search results in more useful ways. Your specific search is clever and useful for a particular kind of search, but it should be more broadly applicable.

]]> By: MarkC http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-177 MarkC Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:15:57 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-177 Jeff, the Wordpress side of the problem is more down to using the ComicPress theme which inserts our comic images directly without providing access to the code.   There's also the mixed capabilities of SVG-enabled browsers to consider. It's not too bad right now, but when IE9 lands anyone using it to view the SVG versions of our comics won't get any of the filters appearing, for example. The object tag lets you fall back to PNG when the browser doesn't support SVG at all, but to fallback when there <em>is</em> SVG support but it lacks some essential features would require quite a bit more work.   Hopefully in a post-IE9 future ComicPress, or something similar, will make it easier to automate this process. Perhaps let you upload an SVG file, auto-parse it for essential requirements, and auto-fallback based on the browser capabilities. I suppose I can dream...   Even where support is present the rendering isn't always the same, of course - the text on your comics (love the OuijaPad, BTW) tends to leak out of the speech bubbles on my Ubuntu+Firefox system, and I've noticed similar issues with my own comics when viewed in a browser. Jeff, the WordPress side of the problem is more down to using the ComicPress theme which inserts our comic images directly without providing access to the code.
 
There’s also the mixed capabilities of SVG-enabled browsers to consider. It’s not too bad right now, but when IE9 lands anyone using it to view the SVG versions of our comics won’t get any of the filters appearing, for example. The object tag lets you fall back to PNG when the browser doesn’t support SVG at all, but to fallback when there is SVG support but it lacks some essential features would require quite a bit more work.
 
Hopefully in a post-IE9 future ComicPress, or something similar, will make it easier to automate this process. Perhaps let you upload an SVG file, auto-parse it for essential requirements, and auto-fallback based on the browser capabilities. I suppose I can dream…
 
Even where support is present the rendering isn’t always the same, of course – the text on your comics (love the OuijaPad, BTW) tends to leak out of the speech bubbles on my Ubuntu+Firefox system, and I’ve noticed similar issues with my own comics when viewed in a browser.

]]> By: Susan http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-174 Susan Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:31:43 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-174 As a newbie to SVG, I find examples by searching for the string i'm looking for, such as 'path d='  and I get some nice hits.  The search results are based on the content of the document. As a newbie to SVG, I find examples by searching for the string i’m looking for, such as ‘path d=’  and I get some nice hits.  The search results are based on the content of the document.

]]> By: Jeff Schiller http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-172 Jeff Schiller Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:25:27 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-172 Ergh, I never know when angly-brackets will get escaped or not.  That should be   <object style="padding-left:75px" width="600" height="900" type="image/svg+xml" data="http://www.codedread.com/comics/005.svgz">[img element with png fallback here]</object> Ergh, I never know when angly-brackets will get escaped or not.  That should be
 
<object style=”padding-left:75px” width=”600″ height=”900″ type=”image/svg+xml” data=”http://www.codedread.com/comics/005.svgz”>[img element with png fallback here]</object>

]]> By: Jeff Schiller http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-171 Jeff Schiller Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:24:36 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-171 MarkC, Cool - I like to hide a couple easer eggs in my SVG comics too.  I haven't figured out the right way to automate the rasterize, fallback, embedding thing, but I found it pretty straightforward to just do this:   <object style="padding-left:75px" width="600" height="900" type="image/svg+xml" data="http://www.codedread.com/comics/005.svgz"> ... put img referencing png here ... </object>   directly in the WordPress editor.  As long as it's one line, I don't think WP should munge up the elements...   See http://www.codedread.com/blog/archives/2010/04/01/005/ MarkC, Cool – I like to hide a couple easer eggs in my SVG comics too.  I haven’t figured out the right way to automate the rasterize, fallback, embedding thing, but I found it pretty straightforward to just do this:
 
&lt;object style=”padding-left:75px” width=”600″ height=”900″ type=”image/svg+xml” data=”http://www.codedread.com/comics/005.svgz”&gt; … put img referencing png here … &lt;/object&gt;
 
directly in the WordPress editor.  As long as it’s one line, I don’t think WP should munge up the elements…
 
See http://www.codedread.com/blog/archives/2010/04/01/005/

]]> By: MarkC http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-164 MarkC Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:18:38 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-164 "MarkC, have you considered proactively publishing in SVG with a PNG fallback?" I did consider it early on, but decided against it for a couple of reasons: 1) We use Wordpress with the ComicPress theme for the site for speed and simplicity, and I don't know of a straightforward way to implement SVG+fallback code in that environment without creating the sort of maintenance issues we're trying to avoid in the first place 2) Even amongst browsers that do display SVG, not all renderers are equal. I usually test with Firefox which does a reasonable job of rendering the comics, but not perfect (when compared with the results we see in Inkscape). As we consider our primary output to be the comic itself, with promoting Inkscape and SVG as secondary to that, we'd rather have a "fixed" version of each strip that renders essentially identically across browsers. I'd like to use the SVG as the primary output eventually - the filesizes (expecially when gzipped) are usually smaller for a start, not to mention the possibilities offered by SMIL and Javascript*, but the browser support and associated tools just aren't good enough yet. I will continue to keep an eye on the situation though, and hope to be able to revise that position one day.   * As an incentive to download the SVG files, each of our comics contains one or more Easter Eggs, which are usually only accessible in the SVG. Some of those eggs do use JS if the file is loaded in a browser, and we're experimenting with SMIL-based Easter Eggs which will probably be used once Firefox 4 is released. “MarkC, have you considered proactively publishing in SVG with a PNG fallback?”
I did consider it early on, but decided against it for a couple of reasons:
1) We use WordPress with the ComicPress theme for the site for speed and simplicity, and I don’t know of a straightforward way to implement SVG+fallback code in that environment without creating the sort of maintenance issues we’re trying to avoid in the first place
2) Even amongst browsers that do display SVG, not all renderers are equal. I usually test with Firefox which does a reasonable job of rendering the comics, but not perfect (when compared with the results we see in Inkscape). As we consider our primary output to be the comic itself, with promoting Inkscape and SVG as secondary to that, we’d rather have a “fixed” version of each strip that renders essentially identically across browsers.
I’d like to use the SVG as the primary output eventually – the filesizes (expecially when gzipped) are usually smaller for a start, not to mention the possibilities offered by SMIL and Javascript*, but the browser support and associated tools just aren’t good enough yet. I will continue to keep an eye on the situation though, and hope to be able to revise that position one day.
 
* As an incentive to download the SVG files, each of our comics contains one or more Easter Eggs, which are usually only accessible in the SVG. Some of those eggs do use JS if the file is loaded in a browser, and we’re experimenting with SMIL-based Easter Eggs which will probably be used once Firefox 4 is released.

]]> By: ddailey http://schepers.cc/formata-non-grata#comment-162 ddailey Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:04:04 +0000 http://schepers.cc/?p=160#comment-162 Doug, some historic data on Google and other search engines as one looks for SVG and allied terms may be found at <a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414614&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=62775187&CFTOKEN=83901696&ret=1#Fulltext" rel="nofollow">http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414614&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=62775187&CFTOKEN=83901696&ret=1#Fulltext</a> cheers David Doug, some historic data on Google and other search engines as one looks for SVG and allied terms may be found at

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414614&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=62775187&CFTOKEN=83901696&ret=1#Fulltext

cheers
David

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