In Europe at least, governmental orginasations have finally come to understand a need for using open standards for the content rather than the next good proprietary format that can be declared dead by it's owner any time. SVG is the only open vector format for web content.

Not only can you use SVG for content, one can design the entire webdesign in SVG nowadays, making development time a lot lower.

SVG will allow external linking to object libraries, something that Flash can't. This also goes for fonts and any content really. So this allows one to change site content very easily, by just updating an SVG file externally.

It can be used by search engines to obtain information.

For IE there will shortly be the Renesis SVG plugin, which shows great promise.

XAML is dead from the start as it's proprietary and thus will never be accepted as a standard by governments. They've finally become a bit sadder and wiser.

Mobile phones use SVG for it's scalability. And it allows one to design a website that's usable on both high res and low res platforms.

The only thing lacking now is a good editor for animated SVG. Jasc Webdraw has been bought by Corel whom have then taken it off the market. Probably this has to do still with MS 40 Mil$ investment into the company that also made it stop it's Linux development efforts. MS ethics aren't all that developed as was proven by the late OOXML bribe conest, so I wouldn't be surprised by that.

Flash in my opinion is a rather useless replacement of bitmaps. It's closed, a struggle to create anything intelligeble with and a hell to edit once created. Try correcting spelling mistakes or making something big with it and changing the content. It's make once content and never look back at it. It's a dinosaur.

XAML runs only on MS platforms. Only a moron keeps using that bloatware that efficively destroyed any performavnce improvement of machines over the past few decades. Only business men are still convinced of it's merits for creating such a load of crap to solve. It's unreliability has already made orginasations our-source their services.

Saas is a misconception going back to the mainframe. I foresee a great increase in mobile devices picking up where the PC was left on the desktop, as full fledged PC's raher than some dumb telephone and PIM. There's a great demand for good UMPC's, try get an OQO Q2 for instance. People want control over their data, especially their private data.

A diversity of screenformats will require a scalable solution for the content. SVG fits very well into that area. Many Chipmakers are creating hardware SVG support for mobile devices. AMD not being the only one.

Just as the screwdriver and crosshead screw are nowadays open formats, so will open formats come to dominate the maturing computer world. It takes some time, but at some point the price tag will dictate the standards, rather than the best technology. Especially when the best technology is the cheapest one there's little chance for closed formats to survive.

Not necessarily; there are techniques like Gilder-Levin where the text is still visible with images turned off.

But it is very good to know that google okay with it when it comes to SEO.

Thanks for the info!

I've had the pleasure of meeting up with Aarron several times since SXSW 07. He is an intelligent, creative and resourceful individual who is passionate about all aspects of this industry. Evaluation of markup strategies like image replacement is just one the aspects of findability that he covers in his book:
http://buildingfindablewebsites.com/

Yes, that was a blatant book plug, but since Aarron didn't do so in his comment, I figured somebody had to mention his book. :)

<h1><img src="headline.gif" alt="Lorem ipsum dolor sit" width="300" height="22"><span class="invisible">Lorem ipsum dolor sit</span></h1>

Sorry for double post...

I use an another technique of image-replacement. So i don't integrate the image as a background-image, but as a normal image in the code and add an invisible span-tag with the real text in it:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit

The class "invisible" looks like this:

.invisible {
position:absolute;
left:-9999px;
}

I need to integrate the headline image into HTML as an image-tag, because it can have 1 or 2 lines and it is generated automatically via PHP.

So what do you think about this? And what thinks GOOGLE about it...?

We had a client last year who used another firm for SEO that made us change our CSS image replacements because they said that's why they weren't getting their search results. Justification finally! Hurrah!

I think another interesting question to ask relating to the use of images for text is whether an image-replaced piece of content has any more SEO weight than the same image in the HTML (not CSS) with the text contained within the alt attribute?

In order for a site to be blacklisted as the German BMW site was in 2006 (see http://www.news.com/Google-blacklists-BMW.de/2100-1024_3-6035412.html), people on the webspam team at Google review it in person. This means that if you're using image replacement legitimately (ie. the text in your image matches the text in the element where the switharoo occurs) the webspam team will not mistake your good deed for a black hat trick.

@Mike - agreed. It's time for the type issue to be resolved.

Let's go browser manufacturers! Take Safari's CSS3 custom font implementation and adopt it already!

In my opinion, generally speaking, when something non-textual has to replace something textual (via CSS, for instance), the textual fallback representation must always be provided: first, because we care about users; second, because we also care about "special" users such as bots and source analyzers like those of Google ;)

Of course it is good to know that Google has "implemented" the right intuition of things!

Design is a service, that's true, but all you really need is a way to make it return more than a one off fee. Templates etc are low level stuff that wont be bringing in revenue a year from now let alone ten.

My suggestion is to start a little design collective with a few others to widen the disciplines represented and offer premium level design services to promising startups in exchange for shares. The startup gets professional quality work at no immediate cost at the point where they really need to develop their brand identity ( a complete package including website, logos, print advertising etc would be a big win for them ) and you get investments that MAY appreciate to many many times the value of the work done.

This has an element of risk but it isn't intended to replace your day job but is more like a lottery ticket with more favourable odds! Most startups will fail, some will produce steady income and the odd one will go nuts and make your fortune.

For my mind the greatest benefit of this scheme is it keeps you doing what you do best at the highest level, not supplementing your pay by pimping haircare products to your customers.

However, I do resize down to all the usual suspects using Icon Builder plugin.

From this article though I am noticing that you are starting small and building up.

I just wondered if you felt your approach was a silver bullet or not.

My current thinking is that I'll let them switch, or hit a different URL for a mobile version. I'm going to serve up simplified templates (PHP/expression engine) and CSS that makes links easy to hit. It'll be iPhone-centric at first, because that's what we use for ourselves. I want to make sure it's full-featured enough, though, and that's going to be the challenge.