Re: Address Bar URI

Thanks Michael.
Very helpful to bring in the SEO perspective, even on a Friday evening.

On 14 Oct 2011, at 21:28, Michael Smethurst wrote:

> Have to say from a pragmatic point of view that using replaceState to switch between IR and NIR (or whatever we're supposed to call them) URIs feels like bad advice for most developers
> 
> Users in older browsers are going to see (and copy and paste) one set of URIs whilst users of more modern browsers are going to see (and copy and paste) another
Maybe now is not the time to do it - but always being backwards compatible is not great.
Actually, users of the old browsers are currently disallowed from copying and pasting the address bar, if what they are after is the NIR or whatever we call it.
The myexperiment.org site has a real problem with this, and on a real system.
I think currently they have to accept that users do it, and then patch up afterwards (by removing the .html).
> 
> So you end up exposing two sets of URIs to the web and to Google et al. Google only consolidates page rank for inbound links on 301s (and not 302s or 303s) so you'd end up throwing your findability away for an esoteric distinction that no-one quite understands. Or understands but doesn't quite agree with :-)
But I think we are currently exposing two sets of URIs.
If we do the rewrite we will only be exposing one set of URIs to the users.

At first I thought "Oh no", we mustn't compromise SEO, and you describe how rewriting the address bar does.
But now I am afraid I don't understand why it does.
The only change is what the user sees in the Bar - so how would that affect the SEO?
Can you elaborate on how it affects SEO please?
I see that, for example googling '"Hugh Glaser" site:semanticweb.org' gets me
http://data.semanticweb.org/person/hugh-glaser as the top hit, and seems to ignore
http://data.semanticweb.org/person/hugh-glaser/html
> 
> For now cross browser support for pushState and replaceState is pretty shonky [1]. It's useful when product managers demand an "app like experience" because you can do all the shiny ajax stuff without nasty ajax #s and it all looks good on their iDevices. They don't need to know that's not what most people see :-)
> 
> With apologies for bringing up S*E*O on a Friday evening. And that aside it just feels like asking people to add more complexity to sidestep existing complexity that they don't understand / see the need for in the first place…..
Remember it was a developer who asked me in the first place, who saw it as an answer to a serious problem he has with the users' interactions.
We should always incline to pushing just a bit more complexity onto the few developers, rather than onto the many, many more users, I think.

Best
Hugh
> 
> 
> [1] http://caniuse.com/#search=replaceState
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-lod-request@w3.org on behalf of Hugh Glaser
> Sent: Fri 10/14/2011 4:22 PM
> To: Norman Gray
> Cc: Linking Open Data; Don Cruickshank
> Subject: Re: Address Bar URI
> 
> I am really no expert - really, so showing my ignorance here.
> I understand:
> 
> JS:
> window.history.replaceState('Object', 'Title', '/another-new-url');
> will do it happily, but I guess HTML5 is required.
> You can use it to change path and search strings, but not protocol or domain, I understand.
> 
> 
> On 14 Oct 2011, at 15:26, Norman Gray wrote:
> 
> >
> > Hugh, greetings.
> >
> > On 2011 Oct 14, at 13:08, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> >
> >> My colleague, Don Cruickshank asked me if it was good practice to rewrite the URI in the Address Bar to be the NIR, rather than the IR.
> >> I was surprised, but he tells me that it is permitted in HTML5.
> >
> > Can you expand on this a little?
> >
> > Is this some HTML5 cleverness that lets one declare in the HTML what the address bar should display?  Or is it some Javascript kludge^Wgadget that does it, in which case what is the sense in which this is 'permitted' in HTML5 and wasn't before?
> >
> > All the best,
> >
> > Norman
> >
> >
> > --
> > Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
> > SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
> >
> 
> --
> Hugh Glaser, 
>               Web and Internet Science
>               Electronics and Computer Science,
>               University of Southampton,
>               Southampton SO17 1BJ
> Work: +44 23 8059 3670, Fax: +44 23 8059 3045
> Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155 , Home: +44 23 8061 5652
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~hg/
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
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-- 
Hugh Glaser,  
              Web and Internet Science
              Electronics and Computer Science,
              University of Southampton,
              Southampton SO17 1BJ
Work: +44 23 8059 3670, Fax: +44 23 8059 3045
Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155 , Home: +44 23 8061 5652
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Received on Saturday, 15 October 2011 13:45:43 UTC