Re:How Googlebot crawls JavaScript
by e12e on Tuesday May 12, 2015 @11:29PM
(#9536568)
>> We're moving from browsers being viewers for simple HTML documents (which can be copied, shared, and linked via simple means)
> Browsers still allow this.
Yes, they allow it. But consider that user stylesheets have been dropped, hardly any improvements have been made with presenting standard html (unless you count giving in to IE and moving from less-stark black-on-grey to too stark black-on-white as an improvement).
Still no browser does a half-decent job of avoiding ragged-right text[1], give you decent margins on un-styled content, etc. There's no real reason for this. You could claim "backwards compatability" -- but if there was genuine interest, there'd be nothing stopping the introduction of a <sane-default-render-html6-whatever> content type.
It's ironic, that browsing a plain html-site in w3m in the console is a better reading experience than opening the same page in a desktop browser. So of course people need to supply a crap-load of stuff just to get decent, basic text layout, that flows well across various screen sizes. No reason a basic, unstyled html-document couldn't look much better than a TeX/LaTeX document published in the 80s, with the added bonus of re-flowing in a sane way for various window/screen sizes -- but they all look awful, too the point that plain html is actually not usable.
You need to wrap a document in js to get sensible layout, and in css to get sensible presentation. Even if the document doesn't contain any other media than text. Add an image or two, and things keep going downhill. It's absurd.
> Browsers still allow this.
Yes, they allow it. But consider that user stylesheets have been dropped, hardly any improvements have been made with presenting standard html (unless you count giving in to IE and moving from less-stark black-on-grey to too stark black-on-white as an improvement).
Still no browser does a half-decent job of avoiding ragged-right text[1], give you decent margins on un-styled content, etc. There's no real reason for this. You could claim "backwards compatability" -- but if there was genuine interest, there'd be nothing stopping the introduction of a <sane-default-render-html6-whatever> content type.
It's ironic, that browsing a plain html-site in w3m in the console is a better reading experience than opening the same page in a desktop browser. So of course people need to supply a crap-load of stuff just to get decent, basic text layout, that flows well across various screen sizes. No reason a basic, unstyled html-document couldn't look much better than a TeX/LaTeX document published in the 80s, with the added bonus of re-flowing in a sane way for various window/screen sizes -- but they all look awful, too the point that plain html is actually not usable.
You need to wrap a document in js to get sensible layout, and in css to get sensible presentation. Even if the document doesn't contain any other media than text. Add an image or two, and things keep going downhill. It's absurd.
[1] http://alistapart.com/article/the-look-that-says-book