Comments on: Proposal for Customizing Google’s Crawlable Ajax URLs

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:37:07 +0000

I like the idea of us having more control as opposed to being locked into Google’s conventions. I also strongly feel we should be able to control the “_escaped_fragment=” part too… what if my app already uses that parameter name for something else?

Uh, rename it? You’re already going to be jumping through hoops to make all this work anyway. I suppose you want to customize background-color to be backgroundColor or just bgc in CSS too? Frankly the background details end users never see aren’t much of a concern to me, and #! is a fair convention to use, if we’re going to be adopting this mess.

Granted, they could offer something more customizable, but in the end all it means more processor time on their servers just to stroke the egos of the 0.0001% of us who make the web sites. Anyway why would you, being Google want to give up branding/bragging rights?

I don’t think we’re there yet with this #! mess; but we can’t disguise theming it as improving it either…

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:58:43 +0000

By: Ajaxian » Telling robots about your crawl-able Ajax apps

Ajaxian » Telling robots about your crawl-able Ajax apps — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:57:03 +0000

[...] Weston Ruter wants to talk to the search robots out there and tell them about the URL format for crawling Ajax apps. [...]

By: "Cowboy" Ben Alman

"Cowboy" Ben Alman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 21:36:31 +0000

Weston, I think the Meta tag is a great per-page solution, and I wouldn't mind seeing even just a plain ol' or something similar that denotes "this is a crawlable single-page web app."

By: Weston Ruter

Weston Ruter — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:27:36 +0000

@cowboy: I’m glad you agree! Any idea on how to communicate our concerns back to Google? I searched and searched for a forum/group to be able to share my feedback, but I didn’t come up with much.

By: "Cowboy" Ben Alman

"Cowboy" Ben Alman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:16:25 +0000

Weston, I agree completely… The completely arbitrary fragment pattern that Google is enforcing here is exactly that.. arbitrary. I don’t want to have to change the way my URIs are decorated on Google’s whim. The robots.txt suggestion is SO much more user-friendly (and hidden from the end-user and my JavaScript).

Granted, any proposed solution needs to be able to work on a per-path basis, as different single page web apps on the same server (or even in the same folder) might have different URI requirements.