Drawing the Right Conclusion

Google just introduced a major new tool for web browsers: a drawing tool for their Google Doc's Document editor. What is significant is that the editor produces drawings using the SVG format (vector based). SVG is an XML based format and can be used in HTML documents. Besides being an open standard, unlike Flash, potentially data contained in the graphic would be accessible for searches and text readers. Also, it shows that SVG can be useful in tools. I have been pining for a tool for content management systems that would allow someone with no code skills (i.e. expert in HTML and CSS), but able to do graphic design to be able to create a template for a web site/page by just playing with an SVG based drawing.

Now for the bad news. I am guessing for multiple reasons the Google drawing application converts the SVG formatted drawing into a bit based graphic format, PNG (similar to GIF and JPEG) for the public version of the document. The editor keeps the SVG version for further editing later, but any public display shows the PNG version. This means that text readers and search engines cannot access the text and other data within the image. The reason for this choice is probably because of Internet Exporer and early versions of other web browsers not being able to display SVG graphics.

But nonetheless this is a big step forward. And as more sites and tools start to use SVG instead of other nonreadable formats or Flash, this early step by a major player may give the momentum necessary to move the Web forward.

Comments

[Jeff Schiller]

I agree with you. It's unfortunate that Google does not use SVG in the actual document, but I think it's a combination of three reasons:

- IE does not handle SVG at all (meaning the vector document would have to VML for IE)

- they would have to use html:object tag to reference an external SVG and some versions of IE do not handle the object tag properly

- another option would be for them to embed SVG inline, but the document would have to be true XHTML (and HTML+VML)

[Daniel Bennett]

Yes, I agree that the answer is the need for IE to catch up (see my web site
http://ValidSites.org/browsers article). There is a good article on adding SVG into web documents at http://wiki.svg.org/Inline_SVG . If SVG was added, then the data that is used on the page, whether in the XHTML or SVG portion could be accessed more easily by search engines, scripts and scrapers.

Perhaps we can shame IE into moving forward by just including an ACID3 compliance note on a page that says to use a compliant browser. Of course that involves using brave web standards folks to do this.

[KonnieoO]

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