TechCrunch reports that Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with the technology to search and index Flash files. Flash websites will no longer be invisible to the search engines. Well, that certainly changes things. Now that Flash won’t be the whipping boy of web design, in the same category as table-based layouts, we have a lot of rethinking to do. What do you think this is going to mean to the look and feel of the web?
WaSP Education Task Force decided it needed a Facebook page. Which means that I finally joined Facebook. I’m probably the last Facebook holdout in America. I’m so beyond the high school/college demographic I’ve never been tempted by Facebook. In my world, Facebook has officially become ubiquitous.
Added 7/2/08: Adobe’s FAQ page about searchable SWF files.
Flash is still not open, and still proprietary. Adobe carefully gives Google and Yahoo the technology to “search” SWF files, but not MSN or any other search engine. It’s still a matter of “Please sir, I’d like to have more”. We still have to “ask” Adobe for permission to get data from these files.
Using page markup, especially semantically valid page markup, with microformats and RDFa, and SVG, we don’t have to ask anyone for anything. All the information is there, available for anyone interested.
Now, which is the better?