Highlighter FAQ

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• How Does the Highlighter Handle Common Elements in Different Locations?
• What is the Difference Between the JavaScript and Crawler?
• What Performance Impact Does the JavaScript Have?

How Does the Highlighter Handle Common Elements in Different Locations?

This comes up often with widgets that may appear in the middle of content or perhaps can move depending on the layout chosen by the page. To handle this, the Highlighter generates several XPaths to provide options for how to pull in the content on your pages.

If you have variations of the same content template, we suggest adding multiple examples in Step 3 of the Highlighter application so it has an opportunity to refine the XPaths generated and ensure that it will work for all variations. You can support this by using consistent class names on these components which will more easily let the Highlighter identify them. If you are still having trouble, manual XPaths can be used to override what the Highlighter has generated.

What is the Difference Between the JavaScript and Crawler?

The main difference between the JavaScript and Crawler integration methods is when and how the markup is generated. How you deploy the markup can still use JavaScript even if you want to use the Crawler.

The Crawler generates markup using a web crawler on the Schema App side. While the way we crawl a site is similar to other web crawlers like Google or Bing, we don't do this to scrape content. Instead, we apply Highlighter templates and produce JSON-LD for each page. This markup is stored on our CDN and can be pulled in with any Schema App deployment method. 

In contrast, the JavaScript will generate markup at runtime after a user or a crawler loads a page. The JavaScript will download a configuration generated by the Highlighter application and build the JSON-LD. The JavaScript can also pull in other JSON-LD (from any source) and inject it into that page allowing it to deploy Crawler markup instead of generating it. For more information, see our Schema App Integrations article.

What Performance Impact Does the JavaScript Have?

Despite our best efforts to optimize the JavaScript, it does have some impact on page speed. For more information, see the Schema App JavaScript Page Impact Overview.