XF 1.0 Semantic HTML

From the outset, XenForo has been built with semantic HTML in mind in order to facilitate styling, boost SEO and give a helping hand to screen reading software.

The W3C provides a useful Semantic data extraction tool that allows the efficacy of this approach to be tested.

Take a look at how easily the tool extracts the important content from an example thread here on XenForo.com:

Semantic Data Extraction for 'Multi-page Navigation Enhancement' thread

generic-metadata-png.220


citations-and-quotes-png.221
 

Attachments

  • Generic metadata.webp
    Generic metadata.webp
    22.6 KB · Views: 14,765
  • Citations and quotes.webp
    Citations and quotes.webp
    42.8 KB · Views: 14,286
Cheers :)

Apologies unnecessary - actually you're right - it wasn't like that a few days ago, I was waiting for a few styling issues to get resolved before I made the step to move it.

Heh, no problem. Thanks for rolling out the improvements. Cheers. :)
 
Something not quite right? Wait a couple of hours (minutes) and it will have already changed.

I've said it before, but the competition talks about agile development. We're actually seeing it here on xenForo, with 1/5 the staff and no special JIRA or other tools, features are being added, fixes made, and streamlining happening within hours.
 
Something not quite right? Wait a couple of hours (minutes) and it will have already changed.

I've said it before, but the competition talks about agile development. We're actually seeing it here on xenForo, with 1/5 the staff and no special JIRA or other tools, features are being added, fixes made, and streamlining happening within hours.

Not to mention all the spam and nonsense they've probably had to sift through.
 
Very good. One of the problems with any script based system is SEO. No script can really compete with plain and simple optimized html pages. But having had a look at XF html output with JS disabled I am forced to change my opinion. This system is shaping up excellently.
 
I've run XF on most of them, on Mac/Windows, and I have not tested Ubuntu desktop yet. I haven't found a browser yet that showed 'major' issues or broken designs.

Works good here: Ubuntu 10.4 / FireFox 3.6.8 :)
 

Attachments

  • printer.webp
    printer.webp
    49.7 KB · Views: 1,362
THIS all by itself is a primary reason that any forum admin that makes real money off of organic traffic should be immediately loading a copy of XF up on their testbed and working out their migration cheat-sheet/walk through ASAP when it's commercially available. There are no words... Just, wow.

Somebody
Got
Semantic
HTML
Right

:) :) :)

Ok. I lied. There are words, but it was hard to stop grinning long enough to type them!

BTW, I tested it in Safari on iOS 4 on my iPhone and it mostly works perfectly. The style chooser popup doesn't function, and the upload dialog (while it's functioning is blocked by file upload paranoia) DOES popup, but the label on the upload file button overlaps. I'm guessing that there will be provision for mobile skins in the nearish future though that will render that feedback meaningless ;).
 
This is one of my favourite things about this software... actual W3C compliance is chased, which IMHO, I'm not sure why more don't keep things mean and lean, as from my experience cross browser compatibility is so much easier. I love semantically correct code, top down... awesome job guys.
 
will custom skins have an effect on this?
That depends what you edit of course. If you only change CSS, it will have no effect at all. If you edit the HTML you would need to be careful to maintain the presence of specific tags in order to retain the semantic meaning of the page.
 
Through these optimisations, for SEO and other benefit, is it safe to say that semantics plays a large part in determining content structure and position to the search engine bots?
 
Through these optimisations, for SEO and other benefit, is it safe to say that semantics plays a large part in determining content structure and position to the search engine bots?
All that anybody can say is that it can't hurt.
 
Top Bottom