Anchors could probably be acceptable as a starting point in a minimum viable product. That wouldn't need the server-side integration. However, you don't need to use anchors with the HTML history API. Calling pushState() changes the address bar without reloading.
- Josh On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 12:26 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote: > > > On 10/11/16, 12:14 PM, "Josh Tynjala" <joshtynj...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >Search engine compatibility is one of the most basic requirements of > >documentation, in my opinion. If you can't find a > >component/property/method > >from Google, it's not very useful. I guess Google's crawler will run > >JavaScript, though. With that in mind, maybe a non-static app can be used > >for the API reference and still be indexed. > > I completely agree that ASDoc must be searchable. I don't know how folks > solve this problem, but IMO, it isn't limited to ASDoc. Any RIA, written > in Flex or not, like a shopping catalog, wants to be indexed by search > engines. Does anybody know what the popular solutions are? Whatever they > are, we want to try to package that as a component, so others can use it. > > > > >I think to do this right, the app needs to use the HTML history API. The > >URL should update as you navigate to pages for different components, and > >the back button needs to work too. Additionally, you need to be able to > >copy-paste a URL and be able to return to the same content later. That > >means that the server needs to know that each of these URLs should load > >the > >exact same HTML. The JavaScript can figure out which JSON content to load. > > > >example.com/docs/ > >example.com/docs/com.example.SomeComponent/ > >example.com/docs/com.example.AnotherComponent/ > > Yep, and we will need to component-ize such functionality for our > downstream developers. > > > > >I know on Apache server, an .htaccess file gives you the ability to > >rewrite > >URLs and load different content. In the example above, you might add one > >in > >the docs folder that tells it to always load example.com/docs/index.html > >as > >long as the request isn't for CSS/JSON/images. > > Again, I don't know what the popular solutions are. Hopefully we have > some knowledgable people in our community. IIRC, for regular Flex, we > used anchors instead of sub-directories, so the browser address bar showed: > > example.com/docs/index.html > example.com/docs/index.html#com.example.SomeComponent/ > example.com/docs/index.html#com.example.AnotherComponent/ > > I think you have to use anchors so the page isn't re-loaded. But whatever > solution(s) is popular, we want to encapsulate it for other app developers. > > > -Alex > >
