No. A path tag with a 500-600 element `d` attribute is not human readable. It is not human understandable or parsable until it's converted into a visual format.
Ask a blind person whether they think SVG charts are accessible on their own without any additional markup or alternate explanations or controls. Ask them if they can read SVG line charts by stepping through the path property. Figuring out how to communicate complicated graphs/charts with lots of data without relying on any visual medium is a complicated problem that we are still trying to solve.
> You could just say "I'm sending you the stylised image of a blue bird, with the instructions on how to draw it using the SVG text standard". Or just, more clearly even, the following string of characters: "twitter_logo.svg"
By that logic, a PNG is also text, because I can do the same thing. All images can have alt tags. Even Javascript Canvas can have fallback text for when it doesn't render. My Twitter png can be transmitted as "twitter_logo.png".
What do people mean when they say text is preferable if not that the textual representation is more useful than the image representation? If you didn't feel like the SVG format was adding any useful information in its rendered form, you wouldn't waste the time sending information to render it. You would just send the alt text.
> I can read it to someone over the phone with a pen and graph paper, and he can draw it exactly like it should be represented, with zero loss of quality
Right, and when that person draws it, they will have converted it from a textual format into a visual one. I can send you the individual pixels of a small raster image over the wire in a textual format and you can sit down on a piece of grid paper and ink in squares until you come up with the final image. At which point you will no longer be looking at a piece of text.
To argue that the fact that we can encode a format over a UTF-8 stream or physically replicate your computer's drawing algorithm makes a thing text seems to me to be a misreading of the original article's point. The original article is not complimentary of Twitter's SVG, it explicitly brings it up as an example of a non-text medium.
If you expand the definition of text to include basically any storeable information that can be theoretically encoded into UTF-8, then sure, I would agree that text in that system is tremendously powerful. But that's not a useful category to talk about, it's so broad that it becomes meaningless.
No. A path tag with a 500-600 element `d` attribute is not human readable. It is not human understandable or parsable until it's converted into a visual format.
Ask a blind person whether they think SVG charts are accessible on their own without any additional markup or alternate explanations or controls. Ask them if they can read SVG line charts by stepping through the path property. Figuring out how to communicate complicated graphs/charts with lots of data without relying on any visual medium is a complicated problem that we are still trying to solve.
> You could just say "I'm sending you the stylised image of a blue bird, with the instructions on how to draw it using the SVG text standard". Or just, more clearly even, the following string of characters: "twitter_logo.svg"
By that logic, a PNG is also text, because I can do the same thing. All images can have alt tags. Even Javascript Canvas can have fallback text for when it doesn't render. My Twitter png can be transmitted as "twitter_logo.png".
What do people mean when they say text is preferable if not that the textual representation is more useful than the image representation? If you didn't feel like the SVG format was adding any useful information in its rendered form, you wouldn't waste the time sending information to render it. You would just send the alt text.
> I can read it to someone over the phone with a pen and graph paper, and he can draw it exactly like it should be represented, with zero loss of quality
Right, and when that person draws it, they will have converted it from a textual format into a visual one. I can send you the individual pixels of a small raster image over the wire in a textual format and you can sit down on a piece of grid paper and ink in squares until you come up with the final image. At which point you will no longer be looking at a piece of text.
To argue that the fact that we can encode a format over a UTF-8 stream or physically replicate your computer's drawing algorithm makes a thing text seems to me to be a misreading of the original article's point. The original article is not complimentary of Twitter's SVG, it explicitly brings it up as an example of a non-text medium.
If you expand the definition of text to include basically any storeable information that can be theoretically encoded into UTF-8, then sure, I would agree that text in that system is tremendously powerful. But that's not a useful category to talk about, it's so broad that it becomes meaningless.