This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

Dear Steve:

On Jul 30, 2012, at 1:35 PM, Lists wrote:

> Hello gr community,
> 
> is there a workaround for "gr:eligibleRegions" available?
> I mean there is a bunch of RDFa markup which makes my site slow down- If I
> want to tell the clients all eligble regions.
> Since my products are available in nearly every country of the world through
> the web, gr:eligibleRegions content="ALL" would be helpfull.
> Are there any aproaches available? Do I have to markup every country/region
> of the world?


First of all, it is a misconception that the current pattern makes your page *slow*. Even if you list 200+ countries, using 200 lines of markup

<div property="gr:eligibleRegions" content="DE"></div>
<div property="gr:eligibleRegions" content="DK"></div>
<div property="gr:eligibleRegions" content="IT"></div>
<div property="gr:eligibleRegions" content="ES"></div>
...

this does not make your page slow, even if it looks verbose.

The reason is that HTTP 1.1 natively supports compression, which means that the serving server will "zip" the markup before sending it over the wire and the client will unzip it on the fly. Since the lines are so similar, the compression rate will be in the order of 90 % or more.

So from the payload that is being sent over the wire, the actual markup will not require significantly more bytes than a syntax that would not repeat the property multiple times.

Second, most pages have a total size of 300k to 1 MB, if you properly count all Javascript and images, while even comprehensive RDFa markup hardly goes beyond 5 - 10 KB extra content. Plus the RDFa compresses much better than Javascript and images. 

So there is no reason to worry. 

If you want to speed up  your pages, 
- setting the cache parameters wisely, 
- tuning database queries and index structures of your database (e.g. mySQL), 
- reducing the amount of Javascript inclusions (both in terms of the number of files and their sizes), and 
- reducing the number of CSS files are much more effective and relevant measures.

See also [1].


As a side note: From a SEO perpective, it does not make too much sense to claim that you deliver to all countries in the world but restrict your list to those to which you actually do business to, because you want to send specific relevance signals to the search engines. So instead of a plain list of all countries, use those 10 - 50 that you actually consider target regions.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes

Martin Hepp


PS: In the next service update of GoodRelations, you will be able to use http://schema.org/GeoShape for indicating the eligible shipping regions. So you could define the Earth's surface as such and use that.

[1] http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Will_the_extra_markup_slow_down_my_page.3F


On Jul 30, 2012, at 1:35 PM, Lists wrote:

> Hello gr community,
> 
> is there a workaround for "gr:eligibleRegions" available?
> I mean there is a bunch of RDFa markup which makes my site slow down- If I
> want to tell the clients all eligble regions.
> Since my products are available in nearly every country of the world through
> the web, gr:eligibleRegions content="ALL" would be helpfull.
> Are there any aproaches available? Do I have to markup every country/region
> of the world?
> 
> c u steve
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> goodrelations mailing list
> goodrelations at ebusiness-unibw.org
> http://ebusiness-unibw.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/goodrelations



--------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

e-mail:  hepp at ebusiness-unibw.org
phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
         http://www.heppnetz.de/ (personal)
skype:   mfhepp 
twitter: mfhepp

Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
=================================================================
* Project Main Page: http://purl.org/goodrelations/