I just wrote yesterday about the issue of AJAX apps being a challenge for searches and how one could go about fixing it, and today’s news are around sitemaps.org created by no others than Goolge and Yahoo! (with Microsoft’s support):

“Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.” (sitemaps.org)

Their solution does not in itself solve the AJAX problem but can augment my proposal quite nicely ;-).

Google Search and other similar crawlers have a difficult time with AJAX applications: they were tuned for full-page-load style traditional web content and don’t adapt well for single-page web applications, where many times there are no well identified URLs for different content and getting to content in the first place is trickier than following a few links (did I mention Flash-based apps?). And still, for most of these sites getting into searches (i.e. exposure) is essential.

ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is a new initiative from the international publishing community to turn the challenges facing the industry from web technologies (especially search) into opportunities in a win-win way, and as a side effect can help Web Applications out, too.

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Borland announced the establishment of CodeGear, a wholly owned subsidiary expected to come to life early in 2007. Read the press release here.

The original plan (from early this year) called for an investor buying the Developer Tools Group. It seems to me this did not work out, so Borland is executing Plan B. Fingers crossed…

Good luck CodeGear!

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