I had the idea within the SVG IG to use Google Doctype to build up SVG reference documentation (better than what is currently at wiki.svg.org), since DocType is supposed to be all about the "open web stack". Since the articles are copyright Google but licensed under the Creative Commons license, I figure this can't hurt if Google turns all evil on us one day.

However, any time I've experimented with Doctype has shown that the project isn't quite ready yet for primetime. I base this on the fact that every time I try to submit a change, I get a long delay and then a 502 error. Mark has assured me they are working on both short term and long term solutions to this problem. He also offered to give me offline commit access to add SVG articles (and even tests) en masse to Doctype. That was a couple weeks ago, maybe now that holidays are over this can become reality? 🙂

§472 · July 8, 2008 · Google, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Doctyping SVG · Tags: , , , ,


Poor WebDevout. All that time and effort into resource sites like that and Google comes along with Google Doctype - with an aim to be the definitive, community-driven source for all documentation about the open web development. As long as the "open web" doesn't include things like XHTML or SVG or SMIL, that is. Oh, and as long as you don't care about the Opera web browser.

It will be interesting to see how the web development community at large reacts to this - I'm guessing mostly positive (as opposed to the backlash I saw regarding Google Knol). I like the test-driven aspect, but since all the pages are text/html, this makes it problematic for some of the technologies that I care about. It will be interesting to see how the project evolves over time as more technologies graduate and make it into Google's view of the 'open web' stack (perhaps when those technologies shed some Draconian pounds). For now, I'll just hope that SVG makes its way back into HTML5...

Anyway, congratulations to Mark Pilgrim for giving it its legs and pushing it out the door.

§460 · May 14, 2008 · Google, Software, Technology, Web · 2 comments · Tags: ,