The New iPad and SEO

Ok, that is confusing isn’t it? Why would the iPad have anything to do with SEO? It also has a little to do with web design.

FLASH

First of all, users of the new iPad won’t be able to use any website that has flash. I don’t like a lot of flash on any website, but there are some good uses for it. I wonder why Steve Jobs and Apple wouldn’t make the iPad flash-compatible?

I found this at Adobe.com

It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple’s DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers.  And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.

If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab — not to mention the millions of other sites on the web — I’ll be out of luck.

SEO

This is only speculation. But Ian Hickson of Google and David Hyatt of Apple are  the HTML 5 editors. HTML 5 is being worked on right now.

According to Wikipedia;

HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietaryplug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern Web sites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block (<div>) and inline (<span>) elements, for example <nav> (website navigation block) and <footer>. Other elements provide new functionality through a standardized interface, such as the <audio> and <video> elements.

Ok, what does that have to do with the iPad and how will it affect SEO? With HTML5, there will be a lot of new elements and elements like the <font> and <center> tags will be eliminated. It will be backward compatible, so you don’t have to run change all of your code.

There will be new APIs built into HTML5 to handle canvas elements for immediate mode 2D drawing, Timed media playback, Offline storage databases, Document editing, Drag-and-drop elements like with AJAX, Cross-document messaging, Browser history management, MIME type and protocol handler registration.

In addition to that, it is speculated that HTML 5 will eliminate the problems with compatiblity with proprietary software applications. And it will be friendlier to iPads and other handhelds as well.

HTML 5 will do one more big thing for me. I hate checking the websites I build in IE, Firefox, Safari and every other browser out there. HTML 5 will make all HTML 5-compliant browsers render error the same way.

We don’t yet know all the ways that HTML 5 will improve things, but I can’t wait for the browser compatibility feature. What do you think?

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• Steve Jobs lights into Adobe, Google (sfgate.com)
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