Kevin, I had a few inline comments on some of what you wrote since I had a few differences of opinion.
On 12/18/06, Kevin Newman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think that's great and don't necessarily think Adobe needs to fix the problem, since I don't think it's Adobe's problem - I like the flexibility.
I think its definitely adobe's problem to the extent that they offer products that are client/server systems instead of just client tools. FDS and Cold Fusion should offer a way to facilitate this most important of issues. Adobe has defined a significant part of its business as building servers in the flash ecosystem. I dont think solving this issue would limit any flexibility. This is a problem for Google and others, to fix, or perhaps one that
there is already a solution for.
I dont see why this would be googles issue really at all. More on this below. The problem with Flex/Flash/AJAX/Expression Blend apps, is that they are
not documents, they are applications.
Actually, many such apps are *both* apps and documents and that is where the problem is. For example a discussion board is an app that manages and displays document type data that deserves to be indexed. How would Google or anyone else
index something like Microsoft Word, or Adobe Photoshop.
You correctly point out that these do not make sense for indexing, but these are not the kinds of apps that we are talking about for user generated content or webapps that have significant indexable data.
To me the answer is as Claus suggests - to build an alternative, server side web app, that serves the documents to spiders and bots (BTW, this can be produced before or after the UI - it's up to the developer ;-) ). The interesting question, and the place that needs focus, is what is the right way to direct traffic from those search pages back into the web app.
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. 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. 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. 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. Regards, Hank
