I think the aim would be to let the developer specify the search data in a properties file that gets compiled into the swf in a specified location with a specified format to avoid having to automatically convert the UI into meaningful search information. Ariel Jakobovits Email: arielj...@yahoo.com Phone: 650-690-2213 Fax: 650-641-0031 Cell: 650-823-8699
________________________________ From: Left Right <olegsivo...@gmail.com> To: flex-dev@incubator.apache.org Sent: Monday, February 27, 2012 12:40 AM Subject: Re: SEO for SWF Was: Flash Platform roadmap > find ways to make it easy to sniff a SWF for searchable text That would be easier if the rendering of SWF was be an entirely separate program. Then, companies, who are interested in searching the output, would be able to "see" what has been actually shown to the user. But there's a huge difference between what users are able to see and what they actually saw. I.e. almost every portfolio kind of site has an "about us" page, where people put the biography of their CEO and some other random stuff nobody cares about (well, maybe the CEO does...). An automatic crawler wouldn't be able to replicate human behavior if they follow the tab index... besides, Flash, especially Flex application have a tendency to completely mess up the tab indexing, so that parts of application become completely inaccessible through it. Then there are things like scrolling... But when you think of all input modes available on touch screen devices... so, again, probably, the crawler would have to know what are the built-in input events that have registered handlers and then try to pipe these events to see what happens in response... Imitating drag events? sounds like mission impossible, if the scenario is to drag something to a particular spot in order to initiate some interaction. Either Google comes up with a Skynet-like crawler, or that isn't going to happen :) It sounds like it's really cheaper to hire labor force in the third world countries and ask them to write a report on what they saw on the site, then to write an intelligent crawler :D
