Added Conformance Criteria for Search Engines

Hi, SVG WG-

We talked about this before, and it has frequently come up in the
community and in the SVG IG.  One of the past problems with SVG is that
search engines did not seem to index it, making it harder to find and
less desirable to use.  This, despite the fact that SVG is chock-full of
text, metadata, and links, and has properties as an image.

To facilitate the SVG IG following up with search engines on this score,
I have added the following passage under "Conforming SVG Interpreters" [1]:

[[
A Conforming SVG Interpreter which indexes SVG content (e.g. a search
engine) must, at a minimum, extract and process all textual data,
including the content of the  text content elements and  descriptive
elements, with attention paid to author-supplied alternate languages for
purpose of presentation and translation. Additionally, it should process
element types, document structure, metadata, and link data to inform the
indexing. A Conforming SVG Interpreter which indexes images should
categorize and represent SVG content as an image. Such an SVG
Interpreter may apply heuristics to the geometric semantics of the SVG
document or to the rendered image (such as performing face-recognition)
to improve indexing.
]]

Please let me know what you think.


[1]
http://dev.w3.org/SVG/profiles/1.2T/master/conform.html#ConformingSVGInterpreters

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, WebApps, SVG, and CDF

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 03:01:34 UTC