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Maybe the real problem is that people aren't making a distinction between pulling down content and pulling down content + markup/presentation/interaction. If y
by jarin 16y ago
Maybe the real problem is that people aren't making a distinction between pulling down content and pulling down content + markup/presentation/interaction.
If you're looking to parse information from a remote resource, you should be pulling it down in JSON or XML anyway, so as long as your application provides data in both human-usable (i.e. Javascripty) format and machine-readable (i.e. RESTful JSON/XML) format, both consumer groups should be happy, right?
I guess one of the problems is that Google only pulls down content + markup. It would be nice if there was a way to provide machine-optimized content to crawlers for indexing, basically telling the crawler "here's the data in XML format, and here's a link to the data in human-interactable format". It's sort of what Google's escaped_fragment URLs do, but escaped_fragment still expects content + markup.
- perlgeek 16y agoI guess a huge problem with exposing machine-optimized content to crawlers is that there are big chances that what the user sees in the end differs from what the crawler sees. That doesn't have to be by malicious intent, it can be enough that a backend developer adds some fields, and the template doesn't use them. On the other hand the machine-exposed data misses headlines that are usually present on all web pages, so that if the user searches for <company name> + <keyword>, special care must be taken that the <company name> part doesn't fail.