Latest Posts from Download Squad

UPDATE: E.W. Scripps SEM Manager Paul Petersen weighs in on the SEO impact of Adobe and Google's announcement.

Adobe's Flash technology has long been the bane of efforts to create a Web site or application that can be indexed by Google, Yahoo! or other search engines. What it lacked in search engine optimization (SEO), Flash made up in offering designers an infinite playground for creating rich-media apps, games and video.

But what good is an application that users can't find?

Yesterday, Adobe and the two search engine leaders came out with an answer: A special Flash player that opens up content within applications and translates it for search engines. Flash content owners and search-engine users should notice results immediately.

This news was also mentioned in today's Googleholic.

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Most Web designers make liberal use of CSS selectors, but that spec's sibling, descendant and child selectors can cause what designer/developer Shaun Innman calls a "significant, negative impact on page rendering." This is confirmed in tests done by UI Specialist Jon Sykes that are published on his blog.

Fortunately for most designers, the performance impact is only in extreme situations. But it's definitely something to be aware of when writing CSS.

The test was based in part on a comment by Dave Hyatt on an entry from Inman's blog.

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Web developer Aza Raskin knows we visit Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Facebook without even having to ask.

No, he isn't employing privacy violating hackery, but he is exploiting a "cute" information leak in CSS that traditionally displays visited links differently than those that have yet to be visited. By loading in an iframe a list of social site URLs to see which are purple (visited) and blue (not visited), an assumption can be made on what sites to prompt users for submitting a story or blog entry.

Raskin has wrapped this functionality in a script called SocialHistory.js.

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