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What we really need is user-agent-requested cloaking.
Example, I should be able to set my browser to ask for....
....and the server/website mixes and matches images, pages, includes, navigations etc etc to closely match what I want.
The days of one URL = one data stream are surely almost over, and it is time we started moving towards giving people what they want.
The customer may not always be right, but they are all different. Customisation is the path to good service, and "cloaking" is the on-ramp.
You got the post of the year - imho
Where does the cloaking come in?
Cloaking (at least as I'm using it) means serving different content to different users. It normally means doing so to spiders in order to trick them.
Maybe we need a different term -- let's try to think of something snappier than user-requested customisation.
But the days of a spider expecting to find "the" page behind a URL will, I hope, soon be gone. A URL is the front door to content, but that content was never intended to be a single set of files.
Search engines are holding back the development of the web by enforcing such an outdated model. The 20th Century was a long time ago.
(Of course, serving content to deceive a spider will still be acrime punishable by exclusion).
But maybe this goes beyond cloaking.
Thank you.
You got the post of the year - imho
Yep, you sure did Victor ;)
It's quite astonishing that the engines are still (sweeping generalizaion coming..) classifying cloaking as bad in such a general manner.
Delivery based on user expectation/prefernce is pretty simple from a webmasters point of view and to not use all the tools at your disposal in order to create great sites would be criminal.
I think the days of 1 IP = 1 data stream are numbered also but, let's not forget that though we may find this concept simple, the vast majority of sites on the net are not made by die hards like us. They're made by 'joe bloggs' who has an interest in 'widgets'.
Untill software for this becomes more mainstream, it'll still be a tool only for pro's...
Nick
Which of course might mean some day a webmaster looks over his girlfriend Delia's shoulder as she surfs and whispers .... Dell, you're getting a DUDE! 8^)
What they don't get to do is make the same sort of explicit choices for web browsing....
Kevin, I think that's it. I don't have a snappy acronym, but we should be able to shape webpages according to two broad areas of customisation:
A URL is then a pointer to a service that assembles the right elements. It won't be a single, immutable, thing any more. And the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned.
I'm located in the UK, but I price in US$, as that is my major market. I would be quite happy though to display those prices in any of the currencies that I would be prepared to provide a quote for.
I could use cookie-based info to dictate what currency gets displayed, having allowed the user to choose their currency. No cookie would mean US$, which would wht the SEs saw.
Additional display options could be offered in a similar user-selectable fashion - e.g. no images, low-res images, different language, etc.
So far then, we get to provide a user-driven display without cloaking. The site seen by the spider would be the same as that seen by a new visitor coming from that engine.
The cookie, however, is not accessible by other domains, so the user loses out on having defined how they want to see their surfing session.
Can a case be made for a local 'über-cookie' of some form? Readable by any domain, and containing a standard set of storable items - currency, image definition, language. Most browsers seem to already have 'accessibility' options built into them. Is it not a case of standardising those, and then making them available to the server that the content is requested from? That could even allow the exact same page to be spidered by different language SEs, providing the spider correctly reported what language it wanted to see.
