Web Dabbling

In an ironic twist, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has written a post about Apple’s decision not to support flash on their mobile devices like iphones and ipads. Jobs paints a picture of flash as being outdated, restrictive, and designed for the “PC era”.
Many of his comments are a direct response to an article by Adobe about the future of Flash technology, which is their response to what others have been saying. Adobe says they’re open, secure, widely used, and supportive of innovation. Apple (and others) say they’re limiting, closed, insecure, and quickly being outdated by html5 and javascript advancements.

The irony of the situation is that Apple and Adobe have been like brothers in the software industry for years. Adobe’s products have always come hand-in-hand with Apple’s products. Things like native support for postscript and acrobat, and a mutual target market group of designers and artists have meant that these two companies thrived together.

Where do I stand?

Like many web developers, I agree with Apple’s decision and the bulk of what Jobs is saying in his letter. I don’t take the extreme position that some developers take when they make blanket statements like “no website should ever be made in flash” (trust me, I’ve heard this a few times). Flash is graphically rich, has sound, and can create extremely flexible and responsive web applications. Creating a professional website for a musician without flash is currently impractical unless you want to forget about playing music on the site for viewers without sufficient html5 support. It would be great if everyone used Firefox, but in practical terms, there are still 20% of people out there using ie6! Clearly we have quite a while before we can replace flash with something new.

But the fact of the matter is that flash is acting as a crutch until a better system can be adopted to do most of these things. Primarily video and audio. Adobe should accept the fact that a software level rendering environment for video is not the future, and that web developers are going to jump on the ability to put sound onto websites without having to publish it from CS4 (or CS5, or any proprietary development environment). Obviously we want the freedom to throw it up with a few lines of javascript, without the time consuming overhead. The reason we don’t is because we can’t, not because Flash is ideal.

Adobe cites some obviously biased figures about how 85% of the top 100 websites use flash. Having an optional flash component to throw some spice onto a website that could easily be replaced by html5 when it’s practical to do so is not looking ahead. Most of the flash I come across is already annoying and unnecessary, unviewable at work (where nobody gets flash to prevent them from watching youtube all day), blocked by noscript or adblocker, and could be replaced by a good jquery coder.

The future is that Flash will become relegated to what it’s actually best for: non-mobile, browser based applications like those goofy games where you hit a penguin with a club to see how far it will go. If Adobe is quick on the ball and manages to code it extremely well, flash might get well supported on mobile devices, but they’re taking too long to provide touch support, and they may never fully convince developers that it’s not a security risk to support it on that kind of platform.

According to SEO guru Matt Cutts (he works at google and is quite renowned for helping us web devs out) a promising new link element that is now being supported by major SEO companies (all we really care about these days is google, isn’t it? I’m sure that’ll change someday. Maybe.) called the canonical link.

This link tag is used to specify how search engines (not to people, although who knows how a user agent might use it in the future) should treat those weird, argument filled URLs that get generated by scripts (like phpbb or this blog) that end in something like mydomain.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=343&f=2 or maybe a session ID at the end of the link like ?SID=3429vhr32if298fg.

For a long time now we’ve been forced to modify our software in all kinds of complicated ways to stop search engines from treating these pages as separate pages when they are often the same page accessed with a different argument.

No longer! Well, not so much anyway. We’ll still need to modify software if we want search friendly URLs. And, actually, google seems to be pretty smart when it comes to detecting duplicate content as a result of variables appended to URLs. Still, I would choose this option over heavy modifications… Actually the more I think about it, the more I realize this is far from a magic bullet… Oh well.

By specifying a canonical link element to a page, crawlers will ignore all that junk at the end of the URL and only index the one, canonical link. It’s also called “normalizing” your URLs. How to do it? Well where you actually implement the code on your software may vary (doing it for phpbb3 culd be tricky if you want all the pages to still get indexed) but the code itself is simple as pie.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

Done. Now they know the page to index is page.html and not page.html?doodle=234975ai398r&biddle=34y

Sweet. Oh, and you can use it to deal with that pesky www subdomain issue. Don’t want google treating www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as different URLs? Just normalize it as above. Woohoo!

Incidentally, the google webmaster tools also has a relatively new option in there to specify a preferred subdomain. I would think these two tools go hand in hand quite nicely.

Just go read his blog entry on it if you need more info. It’s got a cute slideshow that breaks it down for ya.

Let it be settled once and for all. Google does not use the meta keywords tag when ranking page results.

Anyone involved in web development has had to answer questions now and then regarding what can be done to achieve good search engine ranking, and anyone who has seriously looked into the issue knows that Google keeps many of their methods secret, leaving us, the users, to figure it out by guessing and twisting their virtual arms to get answers. Many of the essential methods have already come to light as Google has voluntarily given advice they feel we ought to know. Incoming and outgoing links, relevant content, page titles, and well structured pages are the primary methods. But what about meta tags?

Well, Google has finally laid the keywords meta tag to rest by openly stating that they don’t use it. This should not come as a big surprise to anyone following SEO techniques. A meta tag filled up with spam words goes against everything Google’s philosophy stands for. It is far too easy to fill up this tag with whatever information you want and it was (and still is) the primary target of old-fashioned keyword stuffing methods. Any time something on a website is invisible to the visitors, it is probably either considered black hat or ignored as irrelevant by Google. In the same article, Google explains that it doesn’t really use the description meta tag for ranking either, only for page listings (something users will see if they visit your site from Google).

It is still up in the air if other search engines will use keywords. Many probably do, so it is worth adding a few for the sake of completeness, but the next time a sell prescribed SEO ‘expert’ tells you that keywords are important, you’ll know better. Nothing beats incoming links and page content, and nothing ever will.