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Comment by noduerme

3 years ago

It (and Director, and Flash - and early javascript) were too hard to index and rank for search. The searchability paradigm crushed the creative paradigm in web, financially around 1999-2004 and ultimately culturally to the extent that the former model is barely remembered.

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noduerme

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KerrAvon  3 years ago

That’s not why it didn’t happen. The Web took off in 1995; Google was the first really good web search facility, and it arrived in 1998. There were earlier ones (I remember using AltaVista), but generally if you wanted to find things before Google you used either a directory like Yahoo or other web pages to find stuff.

We also don’t know what “index and ranking for search” would have looked like in a HyperCard-style web paradigm. Something like Google could work; it would have to be a sophisticated enough to parse stacks instead of HTML, but we’re already deep into an alternate universe, so I’ll stop here.

Also, “index and ranking for search” is probably a bad thing. SEO has absolutely destroyed the web.

marginalia_nu  3 years ago

Doesn't really check with how most modern SPAs flourish despite having basically the same problems as Flash of being incompatible with most web crawlers since more often than not you can't trust what they decide to put in the URL bar (if anything) actually links back to the state that is on screen.

  • noduerme  3 years ago

    >> modern SPAs

    Right. It's possible now because of things like Puppeteer. That's fairly recent. Nothing like that existed in the early 2000s to allow crawlers to index either Flash, Java embeds, Proce55ing apps or Javascript content. All scripting was a black box to Google as much as it was to Altavista. You had to place ancillary noscript content on each page to make it accessible to robots. That held true for Javascript apps well into the mid-2010s. My point is that we actually could index Flash sites now if we wanted to, just as we do with Javascript SPAs... however no one was making JS SPAs in the early 2000s, and search penalty was one major reason single page Flash sites fell out of use. The fact that JS SPAs have moved in now to occupy the empty niche left by ES4/AS3 really just proves it was a good and necessary idea for certain types of sites that was kneecapped by Adobe's closed source and the direction the web and search was taking.

  • rchaud  3 years ago

    SPAs have marketing websites that take care of search engine indexing. They also pay to have ads show up on Row 1 when people search for their product.