Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Makes Flash Crawlable
nickull wrote in his journal that "Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of Flash content. Until now, developers had to implement workarounds for exposing text content used in Flash to search-engine spiders and other bots such as using XHTML data providers. While the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet clear how it will be utilized by the search engines, as they have not revealed their algorithms. The SWF specification is openly published."
I've always been surprised that even after over a decade, a credible open source alternative to Flash never arose. We'll likely have usable and open source Silverlight implementations in the near future, so not all is lost.
Regardless, I always expected an open source alternative to Flash to offer better support for web spiders. But with this new system from Adobe, I think we'll see a lot of mis-labeling of Flash content attributes. That in itself will render the system useless, for the most part.
Delivering software simulations for educational purposes is done pretty much 100% in Flash. Used well, Flash is not as bad as your typical slashdotter thinks. I get the complaints against it, but sometimes I feel those non-creative types on here just don't get the usefulness of the tool. What's next? Photoshop is a steamy pile of crap because it isn't open source and has no competition?