RE: hypermedia affordance aspects

> Teaching Google's spiders that 
> <ingredient>honey</ingredient> is a link to 
> ../ingredients/honey/ is part of what I think is needed for 
> people to be able to use XML on the Web - right now if you 
> use anything other than (X)HTML with <a href="../honey" 
> class="ingredient">honey</a> you're doing business behind a 
> locked door. 

I've thought about this and come to a different conclusion.  

The Web allows resources to have multiple representations.  Let the server inform the
client what is available, through hypertext.  Let the client decide which
representation it wants, through content negotiation.  The problem of google not 
understanding the mapping of <ingredient>honey</ingredient> to <a ...>honey</a>
goes away, because I apply the ../ingredients/honey to <a ...>honey</a> mapping on the 
server, using XML technologies.

Google and Bing's search crawlers do a fine job of indexing
our html pages.  Those pages have feed / entries backing them for
machines and 'api' clients.  

If / when a crawler that understands XML (or JSON, for that matter) arises, we can serve them too. 

<a ...>honey</a> is text/html
<ingredient>honey</ingredient> is not only application/xml but also most likely something like application/spl+xml.

If a crawler 'understands' application/spl+xml, it will likely have an
understanding of <ingredient>...</ingredient> and a mapping to
a presentation structure will be unnecessary (for that crawler/search engine),
because it would be built with that content and some presentation in mind.

Cheers,
Peter

Received on Monday, 8 July 2013 18:28:18 UTC