Problem

The original design for FlexWiki had pages displayed using an URL that looks like this:

 http://site/default.aspx/Namespace.Topic

This works fairly well for most search engines (e.g., google and MSN), but not for all (e.g., SharePoint). Some of these search engines look at the URL and pickout what looks like the file extension (.Topic) in the above example and figure out the type of content from that. If the type of content in unknown (as .Topic likely would be in the above example), the search engine ignores it!

Correcting this problem is challenging since many search engines will ignore query strings in their indexing, so that's not really an option.

Solution

FlexWiki is now using a new topic URL format:

 http://site/default.aspx/namespace/topic.html

The two changes are: (1) the namespace is now separated from the topic name with a slash and (2) the ".html" extension is appended, making this look like an HTML file to search engines that use the file extension.

FlexWiki still supports the old format for URLs so existing bookmarks and links to pages will still work (though someday those should get a redirect put in place).

Additional Background

A few addtional notes:

• thanks very much to TommyWilliams and CraigAndera for helping hammer out the correct scheme to solve this problem after I put in the wrong one
• here's some useful information about search engines and URLs: http://www.searchtools.com/robots/goodurls.html

Future Ideas

One of the cool ideas that came up while designing this format is that the .HTML at the end (which FlexWiki currently ignores), could become replacable with various extensions (e.g., .txt, .xhtml, .xml, .xaml). These could serve as an indicator to fire up a different output format from the FlexWiki formatter.

 http://site/namespace/topic