I think that something like UrlKit integrated into the framework would be very valuable.
The functionality is worth having by itself , but I think it would enable other significant features apart from seo. I also think it is the kind of feature that is best done by the core framework team in order to get consistency. Otherwise you get one developer using UrlKit, another putting together a simple thing of their own, and you lose the benefit of using the same classes for building on top of it. An example, and something I have thought a lot about over the years is something to improve on accessibility. It has always bothered me that working with screen readers is considered "the goal" for visually impaired users. You go to all that work, limit yourself to IE, and what do you get? Something that the user needs an 800 dollar program to use; in order to hear terrible sounding - nearly incomprehensible - computer synthesized voice. How can we improve on this? Record a live human voice for each piece of content and interface interaction. It is easy to do and not expensive. Folk in the multimedia cd days did it all the time, but bandwidth issues kept folk from doing it in dialup days and nobody seems to have rediscovered it now that it is practical again. Somebody creates a web site over a month or two, adding an audio engineer with a good reading voice and you can get all of your content recorded in 3 days to a week. The most difficult part of it is synchronizing your content assets. Usually you use some graph based naming convention based on your site structure. If folk did this to a spec, one could create an audio search widget for the visually impaired that limits itself to sites with human readable content (or uses a server side synth tool to cover the bases) The only difficult thing is that you really need a spec to adhere to as folk who do this will come up with their own naming conventions and you can get clumsy navigation inconsistencies. But now lets say you have a deep linking toolkit that everybody uses and relates to the visual states and the history mechanism. Now the synchronization of audio assets is easy. You just wait until the app is finished and have your audio talent go through each state and record the content and navigation cues. Have them use FMS and they dont even need to have any audio engineering talent. And forget monolithic podcasts, how about navigable trees of audio content linked to text. How do search engines plan on indexing audio content anyway? Finally, I also believe that the search providers will be more inclined to make their changes when a spec and the functionality exist that their competitors can take advantage of if they ignore it. Anyway, thats what id like to see, deep linking with as general purpose as possible features so that we could design little audio indexing and navigation widgets. On 2/21/07, Tom Chiverton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wednesday 21 Feb 2007, Matt Chotin wrote: > Deep linking on its own of course has benefits, better URL support in > the address bar for bookmarking, copying into an IM or email, and even > cleaner history management. But I would contend that most folks want > deep linking so that pages can show up in a search engine, that while > deep linking is nice, SEO is even more important. Well, we'd want it for the first reason - we could email preople saying to go to http://funkyapplication/viewName/itemID for instance. We've not looked at maybe using the HistoryManager for this yet. > Q1: Do you think about deep linking primarily in the context of SEO, or > do you often want deep linking for non-search-related tasks? Our key usage of Flex at the moment is extranet stuff: workflow/pipe line visulisation, a sprinkle of search and 'have a conversation', our corporate site is CFML with Verity for searching the content. Obviously SEO would be more important if we ever re-did it in Flex. > Q2: Would you have us invest in deep linking before SEO, or is it of > more use to you if they come out together? Are current deep-linking > solutions sufficient for you at this time? I would rather have things as and when they are ready, than hold up one feature because another isn't ready - this applies in general (think Linux flash player !) as well as here. -- Tom Chiverton Helping to appropriately leverage open-source materials **************************************************** This email is sent for and on behalf of Halliwells LLP. Halliwells LLP is a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales under registered number OC307980 whose registered office address is at St James's Court Brown Street Manchester M2 2JF. A list of members is available for inspection at the registered office. Any reference to a partner in relation to Halliwells LLP means a member of Halliwells LLP. Regulated by the Law Society. CONFIDENTIALITY This email is intended only for the use of the addressee named above and may be confidential or legally privileged. If you are not the addressee you must not read it and must not use any information contained in nor copy it nor inform any person other than Halliwells LLP or the addressee of its existence or contents. If you have received this email in error please delete it and notify Halliwells LLP IT Department on 0870 365 8008. For more information about Halliwells LLP visit www.halliwells.com. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links
