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Comment by thomasfromcdnjs | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking for a while that the larger spidering community (google/bots) can just agree on a way to associate data with a url.

e.g.

https://blah.com/dashboard (web assembly) (not indexable)

https://blah.com/dashboard.data (common format for representing data) (what the DOM currently tries to do)

Then somewhere in your <head> you point it at the pages data representation.

I'm going to bet something like this will happen and be a stepping stone towards the future.

It will have a million or so problems to solve such as accessibility, but I'm convinced all we do in programming is reinvent wheels but reduce the friction to speed as we go.

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Wouldn't separating the indexable content from the actual DOM representation be a huge opportunity for abuse? It seems like it would make it much easier to game SEO or mislead users for even more malicious reasons.

Yeah I agree, don't doubt it will have problems.

Search engines have been dealing with black hat SEO for a while now. I'm a bit persuaded that Google knows whats up.

As in, I think it's just one of those inevitable technical challenges of castle defence.

Build better walls, they build better trebuchets, ad infinitum.

That's interesting you mention.

I think it's already happening in a little different form with Structured Data [1] and schema.org and it's using for example JSON-LD [2].

But a separate endpoint might also be an evolution. Right now this could be the sitemaps and robots.txt as an entrypoint for spiders.

Although the one drawback that comes to my mind with a separate endpoint is that it'd have to be kept in sync with the normal page and that might vastly enlarge the costs for maintaining it. So keeping it close to the DOM seems to be reasonable

[1]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-struc...

[2]: https://json-ld.org

Sounds like we come from the same experience.

I think for anyone who wants to pioneer this idea, the costs will be noticeable, but that's what bandwagons and the youth are for =D

Ultimately I think there will be a reduction in costs (bits, process, maintenance)

To steal from React lingo, UI represented as state, that is more or less what any web page is.

Wrapping it in a meta layer like the DOM just adds overhead which I think can be optimized.

I'm undecided but still entertaining the idea.

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