That may be a great news for all the newbie in Flex, accordign to Michaël Chaize, Bruce Eckel (the author from Thinking in Java) and James Ward are preparing a book for developers willing to learn Flex.
Ahmet
Jul 102008
I’ve just read via the AXNA that Adobe, Google and Yahoo! worked together to allow SWF searchability. My first thought was ‘finally they made it’ :)
But while reading the FAQ I’ve been a little disappointed by how this indexation seems to happen:
[...]The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, runs a SWF file similarly to how the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser, yet it returns all of the text and links that occur at any state of the application back to the search spider, which then appears in search results to the end user[...]
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[...]All of the extracted information is indexed for relevance according to Google and Yahoo!’s algorithms. The end result is SWF content adding to the searchable information of the web page that hosts the SWF content, thus giving users more information from the web to search through[...]
So I’m afraid that it means that there will be absolutely ‘semantic’ information on the indexed tag. Is this text a title, a paragraph or an image caption? Does this mean that the SEO effort we have to do on SWF are only based on text and keywords?
If you have text with an Alpha of 0 but that have a tween, will it be indexed?
I’m very happy that A_G_Y are working to offer a better indexation and searchability of SWF but as far as I understand it, they are completely missing the SEO point here.
What do you think?
Ahmet
May 052008
Recently Digg made an official adoption of RDFa (a set of extensions to XHTML being proposed by the W3C). While watching a tutorial about RDFa (below video) I asked myself how it could be possible to do it for Flash/ Flex document.
In fact bringing RDFa to a SWF itself is not possible, as I far as I know, but if you use XSLT and XML to provide the data to your SWF then you can also add the RDFa extension into your content, very easily!
Some more explanation on how to embeded RDF attribute on a XHTML web page:
Ahmet
The discussion about SEO (search engines optimization) and SWF content(from Flash or Flex) has been long and turbulent.
Fortunately this discussion is coming to an end as now a proven solution exists. I made yesterday a presentation about it at the Adobe User Group of Geneva.
Here is the solution I prefer: using XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) and transformation (XSLT) to rewrite an XML files containing data used in the SWF. As a result we got an HTML file for the search engines and a SWF for the human. Not clear?
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This diagram shows how XSLT is central to all the work.
How does it work?
You will need 3 files:
1) a .XML
2) a . XSL
3) a . SWF
Continue reading »
During our next event at the Adobe User Group of Geneva I will make an introduction to SEO strategies and the best practice to extend them to SWF powered content. This presentation could also be named SEO for Rich Internet Application. As it is just an introduction I’ll try to make it in 30 minutes maximum…
The second presentation will be made by Cédric Tabin about Remoting with AS3 and AMFPHP.
If you are in Geneva our around, you are more than welcome (just ping me if you stay for the pizza: hello AT augg DOT ch)!
The event takes place at our friends local, the Nomades.
Looking forward to meet you there :)
More information about the event.
Ahmet
Mar 102008
That is a big news! The Flex Builder 3 Professional is now free for all students and edu customer:
Adobe Flex Builder 3 Pro is available for free to all education customers. This includes all students, faculty and staff of eligible education institutions.
Wondering why you finished your study so early?
:)
Ahmet
This apply with EcmaScript 4.0,Francis Cheng made a clear explanation of how to use Type Parameters to add type checking in a collection class.
Very useful, now when will AS3 and JS be compatible with this new format ? Well be patient (and try to stay young and fresh :p)
Ahmet
