> This it seems is not that interesting a question because it is the
> easy part. Flash/Flex apps can easily read data in the URL and go to
> the right place in the app which can then use remoting to get the data
> in the right format for the app.
Yeah, but it has to run to do that, and then the displayed data has to
be interpretable by the bot - if that can be standardized enough for a
spider to understand what it's got back from the server (maybe an event
system that says "hey I'm ready to be indexed", or "read me now" -
screen readers have to be able to do this, so I guess it might be
possible), that's great, but I don't know if spiders will be that smart,
or if companies like google would be willing to build such a bot that
can run apps like that. I suppose it would be more ideal than two
different types of links into the app (hash # and query ?).
Of course the bot would still need to know how to crawl the site (where
to get urls) - I guess sitemaps.org could come in handy here. A smart
enough bot wouldn't even have to reload the app (if the app don't break
at least).
The html can definitely be formatted in such a way that bots can read it. I
am not at all an HTML, XHTML, or JS expert, but as I understand it from lots
of other folks this is no big deal.
> I think the easiest way to do that would be with a small snippet of
> JavaScript that would detect for Flash Player (or whatever the app
> requires) then location.replace you into the appropriate location
> within
> the application (which would need deep linking support, and there
many
> ways to do that now).
>
>
> This, it seems to me is more complicated than necessary. I do this in
> my current app without any javascript snippet (cuz I dont know jack
> abou js!). I just read the parameter from the application object go to
> the right place in my app and load the appropriate data from the server.
Do you do this after the page loads, or when the app is requested?
Well, I guess I dont know when it happens. In flex, when an app loads, you
can get the URL parameters in an object that is part of the applications
object. I guess that happens when the page loads and then the page loads the
swf.
> What's needed now is a concrete example to follow, or a set of
> patterns
> or standards, or whatever, that will ease the development of this
> second
> view of your app's content.
>
>
> I think the server side code to do this is more than just a standard.
> I think we need an entry point on the current adobe remoting products
> for adding XML to the HTML response of a url with addition field or
> query information.
For Adobe's products, a tool that would help developers build something
like that into their content systems, would be useful.
>
> It would be nice if Google and Adobe (and whoever else) could get
> together and figure out what these standards/patterns should look
> like,
> but there's no reason the development community can't get this
figured
> out. :-)
>
>
>
> I dont think google needs to do much here. If we can get the server
> product to easily allow XML to enhance the HTML response then googles
> indexing will just work.
I'd love to see this work in a concrete example. ;-)
Again, I am not an HTML expert, (Claus is really the guy that has the
expertise to be saying this) but this is really just the kind of stuff that
he has been talking about. I am just putting a little more specific meat on
the bone. I think Claus pointed to a flash website that does this that he
mentioned earlier in this thread.
Regards,
Hank
