Thursday, January 25, 2007

Flex 2 and SEO

I have been thinking a lot about FXT lately. This is a really interesting idea. Basically, you are creating an html page that contains nothing but content formatted into an xml structure and a Flex swf file that can parse the content to display in a full page flash layout. The xml can contain your sitemap structure which could be parsed using E4X into whatever kind of navigation you want, you could setup different nodes in the xml for different columns in the layout, the possibilities are wide open. All of this is databound to Flex controls or components so that Flex knows where to put everything. On top of that, you can use states to reformat the content on the fly. For instance, creating a state for a print version of the page, being able to change a page in real time from a two column layout to a three column layout, having a drag and drop layout that would remember the user's setting on a return visit, all of this would be trivial to build. And the best thing of all is that since the source of the html file would be almost purely content, the search engines can index your site just as they can a standard html site. Very exciting stuff.

2 comments:

Cloud said...

Thats a pretty cool idea. You're right it would be fairly easy to implement... at least a lot easier than managing two seperate sites (one flash/flex and one HTML). Do you know of anyone (blog posts or articles) of any one that has implemented this.

Pat Smitherman said...

Hi Cloud,

I haven't seen a lot about FXT lately; however, I haven't really looked into it lately. I've built a few test projects to kick the tires so to speak, but nothing out in the wild. The idea is very interesting. Let me know if you find anything in your research, or you use it in a site.